Paul Farley

Paul Farley FRSL (born 1965) is an English poet, writer, and broadcaster.

Life
Farley was born in Liverpool. He studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art, and has lived in London, Brighton and Cumbria. From 2000-2002 he was the poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere.

The same year he also published a study of Terence Davies’s film Distant Voices, Still Lives. In 2007 he edited a selection of John Clare for Faber'sPoet to Poet series. He has also written a great deal for radio, and often writes more widely on art and literature.

As a broadcaster he has made many arts features and documentary programmes for radio and television, as well as original radio dramas. His poems for radio are collected in Field Recordings: BBC Poems 1998-2000. He makes regular appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review and Front Row and BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.

His book, Edgelands, a non-fiction journey into England’s overlooked wilderness (co-authored with Michael Symmons Roberts) was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. His most recent collection is The Dark Film, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2012.

He currently lives in north Lancashire and is Professor of Poetry at Lancaster University.

Recognition
His first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998) won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1998, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. The book also gained him the Somerset Maugham Award, and in 1999 he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

His second collection, The Ice Age (2002), received the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 2004, Paul Farley was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets.

His third collection, Tramp in Flames, was published in 2006, a poem from which, ‘Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second’, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem.

His non-fiction book, Edgelands, received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award 2012 and was serialised as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

In 2009 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.

Awards

 * 1996 Observer/Arvon International Poetry Competition
 * 1997 Geoffrey Dearmer Memorial Prize
 * 1998 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
 * 1999 Whitbread Poetry Award (shortlist)
 * 1999 Somerset Maugham Award
 * 1999 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
 * 2000 Arts Council Writer’s Award
 * 2002 Poetry Book Society Choice
 * 2002 Whitbread Poetry Award
 * 2003 T.S. Eliot Prize (shortlist)
 * 2005 Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem
 * 2007 Griffin International Poetry Prize (shortlist)
 * 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize (shortlist)
 * 2009 Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction
 * 2009 E.M. Forster Award (American Academy of Arts & Letters)
 * 2009 Travelling Scholarship of the Society of Authors
 * 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry (shortlist)
 * 2012 Poetry Book Society Choice
 * 2012 Foyles Best Book of Ideas
 * 2012 The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (shortlist)
 * 2012 T S Eliot Prize, shortlist, The Dark Film

Poetry

 * The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (London: Picador, 1998) ISBN 978-0-330-35481-3
 * The Ice Age (London: Picador, 2002) ISBN 978-0-330-48453-4
 * Distant Voices, Still Lives (London: British Film Institute, 2006) (about the film of the same name by Terence Davies) ISBN 978-1-84457-139-0
 * Tramp in Flames (London: Picador, 2006) ISBN 978-0-330-44007-3
 * Field Recordings: BBC Poems (1998-2008) (London: Donut Press, 2009) ISBN 978-0-9553604-6-6
 * The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) ISBN 978-0-86547-917-3
 * Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness (with Michael Symmons Roberts) (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011) ISBN 978-0-224-08902-9
 * The Dark Film (London: Picador, 2012) ISBN 978-1-4472-1255-3

Edited

 * John Clare Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2010) ISBN 978-0-571-27427-7

Selected Broadcast

 * Strange Meetings: Wilfred Owen 	BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature, 2006
 * Auden: Six Unexpected Days		BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature, 2007
 * Why Birds Sing				BBC4 Television: February 2007
 * A Poet’s Song				BBC Radio 4: Feature, 2008
 * The Larkin Tapes				BBC Radio 4: The Archive Hour, 2008
 * The Lament of Swordy Well		BBC Radio 4: Feature, 2008
 * Children of the Whitsun Weddings BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature, 2009
 * A Poet’s Guide to Britain		BBC4 Television: May 2009
 * Rude Britannia				BBC4, BBC2 Television: June 2010
 * The Electric Poly-Olbion		BBC Radio 4: Poetry Feature, 2010
 * Lunch Poems: Frank O’Hara	         BBC Radio 4: Poetry Feature 2010
 * Edgelands				  BBC Radio 4: Book of the Week, 2011
 * The Sleep Diaries		  BBC Radio 4: five-part series, 2011
 * Dee					  BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature, 2012
 * Night Visions			BBC Radio 4: Feature, 2012
 * The Person From Porlock		BBC Radio 4: Feature, 2012

Radio Drama

 * When Louis Met George 	BBC Radio 4: The Afternoon Play, 2003
 * The English Civil War 		BBC Radio 4: The Afternoon Play, 2004
 * The World in Your Ear 		BBC Radio 4: The Friday Play, 2006
 * Hide					BBC Radio 4: The Afternoon Play, 2007
 * Inside the Bonfire                BBC Radio 4: From Fact to Fiction, 2010
 * The Switch-Off Personality	BBC Radio 4: Stories (Bath Festival 2011)