Annie Freud is a poet, artist, editor and teacher. Annie Freud was born in London in 1948. She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, maternal grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. She studied English and European Literature at the University of Warwick. A pamphlet, A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose (Donut Press, 2006), was followed by her first full collection from Picador, The Best Man That Ever Was (2007), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and received the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for Poetry. Her second collection, The Mirabelles (Picador 2010), was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.
In 2014 she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets. She is renowned for her live performances. Her poem ‘The Jeweller’ was highly commended by the judges of the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2016. In 2012 she curated a performance of her father Lucian Freud’s favourite poems at the National Portrait Gallery.
She runs a thriving poetry composition group in Dorset where she has lived for the last 10 years and is regularly invited to give readings, talks and workshops at festivals in the UK and internationally. Her third collection, The Remains (Picador 2015) received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. See more details here
Mark Granier has published five collections of poetry. His latest was Ghostlight: New & Selected Poems, published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. He is also an award-winning photographer who has had work in the Oxo Gallery in London and the Royal Hibernian Academy. His solo show last year in the Dlr Lexicon was titled Ghostlight, after his last collection.
In his review of Granier’s fourth collection, Haunt, the poet and critic Peter Sirr writes: “Mark Granier’s first collection, Airborne, was published in 2001 and was followed by The Sky Road (2007), Fade Street (2011), Haunt (2015). As these titles suggest, the poems are in fact full of skies and hauntings, the missing, the dead, time’s erasures. Granier is an accomplished photographer drawn to urban scenes, often to the overlooked or underappreciated – overhead wires, bus shelters, the aftermath of a parade, people in all their astonishing variety. The same quality of attention filters through to the poetry.” Sirr also mentions Granier’s attraction to “liminal spaces, where city meets water, where boundaries are elided, where one kind of possibility meets another, or one kind of clarity meets another”, and “that this attraction to the liminal is also seen in the way he’s drawn to elegy in fine poems about his mother, and the often intriguing evocations of the absent father, less real than imagined or conjured.” See more details here.