Maura Dooley
Poems

Maura Dooley was born on 18 May 1957 in Truro, Cornwall, to Irish parents, and grew up in Bristol. That dual inheritance — Irish roots, English upbringing — runs quietly through her work, shaping a sensibility alert to displacement, belonging, and the emotional charge of ordinary objects and places. She studied at the University of York, graduating with a BA in 1978, and later attended the University of Bristol from 1980 to 1981. Before her reputation as a poet was fully established, Dooley was already shaping the literary culture around her. From 1982 to 1987 she directed the writing centre at the Arvon Foundation in Yorkshire, and she won the Eric Gregory Award in 1987, the prize that recognises the most promising British poets under forty. She then moved to London to serve as programme director of literature for the Southbank Centre from 1987 to 1993, a role that placed her at the centre of British poetry's public life. In the 1990s she also worked with Jim Henson Productions on family films and with Performing Arts Labs on theatre workshops, a range of activity that reflects her consistent interest in how stories reach audiences. Her debut full collection, *Explaining Magnetism*, appeared in 1991, followed by *Kissing a Bone* in 1996, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and brought her work to a wider readership. The title poem and the collection as a whole established the qualities that would define her: plain, exact diction carrying compressed emotional weight, a gift for the telling image drawn from domestic or scientific life, and an undercurrent of loss that never tips into sentiment. *Sound Barrier* followed in 2002, and *Life Under Water* in 2008, also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, deepening her exploration of time, memory, and the persistence of the dead in the lives of the living. *The Silvering* appeared in 2016, the year she also received the Cholmondeley Award, and her most recent collection, *Five Fifty-Five*, was published in 2023. Dooley has been shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize for a single poem twice, in 1997 and again in 2015, a span of nearly two decades that speaks to the sustained quality of individual poems across her career. She has edited anthologies including *Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets* (1997) and *Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems* (2003), and co-edited *How Novelists Work* (2007) with Tony Curtis. She also co-translated, with Elhum Shakerifar, *Negative of a Group Photograph* by Iranian poet Azita Ghahreman, published in 2018. Dooley is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. She has served as a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Poetry Competition, the Forward Prizes for Poetry, and the London Arts New London Writers Awards.