Tim Liardet

Personal statement

Tim Liardet is Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University. He teaches the Poetry Workshop 1 and 2 and the context module Poet’s Eye at MA level, a cohort of PhD students focussing particularly on poetry and runs the Form and Listening module—largely concerned with poetic form—at undergraduate level.

Twice shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, for The World Before Snow (Carcanet) and The Blood Choir (Seren), Tim Liardet has produced eleven collections of poetry to date. He has also been longlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, received several Poetry Book Society Recommendations, a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, an Arts Council England Writer’s Award, a Society of Authors Award, a Hawthornden fellowship, four Pushcart nominations, and various other awards.

His poems have appeared or are due to appear in The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Slate Magazine, North American Review, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and many other journals. Arcimboldo’s Bulldog: New and Selected Poems appeared from Carcanet in 2018. In September 2019, he received an Authors’ Foundation work-in-progress award from the Society of Authors for his twelfth collection Atlas, Tick, Hog and Gold, now nearing completion.

Academic qualifications

• BA (Hons) University of York

Professional memberships

• Poetry Society
• Poetry Book Society
• Welsh Academy
• The Arvon Foundation

Other external roles

• Teaching Creative Writing in Stoke Heath Prison, 2001
• Teaching MA Creative Writing, University of Bristol (2002 onwards)
• Reading poetry submissions for New Writing Journal
• Moderator for Norwich School of Art and Design, 2005
• Poet in Residence, The Guardian, 2006
• AHRC Collaborative Project on Training and Development for PhD Students in Creative Writing
• Regular courses taught for the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton, Lumb Bank and The Hearst from 2004
• Teaching at Ty Newydd, the National Writers' Centre for Wales
• The Association of Writers and Writing Programs: AWP Conference, Vancouver 2005
• The Association of Writers and Writing Programs: AWP Conference, New York 2008
• The Association of Writers and Writing Programs: AWP Conference, Chicago 2009
• The Association of Writers and Writing Programs: AWP Conference, Washington DC 2011
• The Association of Writers and Writing Programs: AWP Conference, Chicago 2012
• Visiting Professor to College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine, 2015-2016
• External Examiner, University of Warwick, 2016-2017
• External Examiner, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2016-2019
• Poetry Book Society Selector, 2016-2019
• Judge for the Plaza Poetry Prizes, 2024

Teaching specialism

• Transatlantic poetry
• The shifting of form in contemporary poetry
• The poetry sequence
• The Long Poem
• Creative Punctuation
• The publishing market for contemporary poetry
• The interface between Poetry and Prose
• The 'poetic techniques of novelists': De Lillo , Golding, Lawrence, Marquez, Nabokov, Woolf, Melville
• ‘The Organ Music of Milton'
• Ted Hughes and the Dark Gods of Nature
• Ekphrasis
• The Paradoxes of Audodidacticism