Sheenagh Pugh

 I was born in 1950. I live in Shetland with my husband. I have published nine collections of poetry and translations, plus a Selected Poems and a sort of mini-Selected, two novels and a critical study of fan fiction (see Books). I translate poems mainly from German but sometimes also from French and Ancient Greek. I read German and Russian at the University of Bristol and used to teach creative writing at the University of Glamorgan.  I still visit Cardiff, where I used to live, regularly.

My interests are language, history, northern landscapes from Shetland to the Arctic and all points in between, snooker, mortality, cyberspace (I waste massive amounts of time online) and above all, people. I like to use poems to commemorate people and places, sometimes to amuse, to have a go at things I don't like (censorship, intolerance, pomposity) and above all to entertain. 

I have been accused of being "populist" and "too accessible", both of which I hope are true.

I have won many prizes and awards, including the Forward Prize for best single poem of 1998, the Bridport Prize, the PHRAS prize, the Cardiff International Poetry Prize (twice) and the British Comparative Literature Association's Translation Prize. My poems have been included in several anthologies, notably Poems on the Underground and The Hutchinson Book of Post-War British Poetry. They have also been set to music, have appeared on the trams of Helsinki and the St Petersburg Underground, and have been translated into German, French, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

My blog is here.  It's usually about writing-related stuff.

Events

 Tuesday May 11th 2010, 8pm, reading for CBI Poetry at Michaelhouse, Cambridge.

Just so people know - I am happy to do readings, or talk about my own work and poetry or literary translation  more generally, but I don't really want to do workshops any more.  I have spent 20 years leading creative writing workshops for a living and I've had enough of them. But I do go into schools to read and talk about my poems. This may be less easy in future, because I now live most of the time in a less accessible place. Your best chance is to give me lots of notice so that we can sort out a date.

My Later Selected Poems (see below) was launched in Cardiff on September 16th and here's a photo (courtesy of Amy Wack, Seren) of me signing a copy for the poet and fantasy author Catherine Fisher.

News

 I've been making some new YouTube vids, or rather Amy Wack of Seren has been making them while I read the poems.  Here's "The Beautiful Lie". There are others on the Links page.  A performer called Jane Learmonth has also put up a vid of her reading my poem "It's Only Love".

I won third prize in the Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition and went to the Edinburgh Book Festival to collect the prize. I've blogged about it here. The poem is called "Travelling with Ashes" and is in the blog post.

Seren has just published my Later Selected Poems, which contains work from five post-1990 collections, Sing for the Taxman, Id's Hospit, Stonelight, The Beautiful Lie and The Movement of Bodies.  Go here to see more about the Later Selected and a sample poem. 

Not poetry-related, but I have moved from Wales and now live in Shetland. Whether this makes me a Shetland poet, or a Welsh poet in exile, I'm not sure!

 My collection Long-Haul Travellers was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize, and was also long-listed for the Wales Book of the Year Prize. 

  Go here for more details on the book.

The title poem from The Movement of Bodies appeared on the Guardian's Poem of the Week  blog.

 The literary translator Sadurní Vergés has put a Catalan translation of "The Extra" on his blog Distopies.