Hannah Copley
Hannah Louise Copley | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1988 (age 37–38)[1] |
| Occupation | Poet, Lecturer[2] |
| Nationality | British[3] |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Education | BA, MA, PhD |
| Alma mater | University of Leeds |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable works | Lapwing |
| Website | |
| hannahcopley | |
Hannah Copley is a British poet and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. She is a poetry editor at the literary magazine Stand, and the author of two poetry collections, including Lapwing, which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, the second-place winner in the 2024 Laurel Prize, and was nominated for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize.[4]
Education
Copley was educated at the University of Leeds and has a BA in English and History and an MA in English Literature. Her doctoral studies on the poetry of Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison in the School of English at Leeds was funded by an AHRC block grant.[5]
Career
Following her PhD, Copley has worked in small press publishing, taught Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she joined in 2018, and has taught at the University of Westminster since January 2019.[6]
Copley has published work in Poetry, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, and elsewhere. She runs poetry events at the Soho Poly in London and is a poetry editor at Stand, where she first started as a student volunteer.[3][5] She was awarded the YorkMix Poetry Prize in 2018 and the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2019,[7] and was one of the festival artists for StAnza in 2025.[8] In 2025, she also judged the Ware Poets Open Competition.[9]
Copley, noted as an "award-winning ecopoet",[10] has authored two poetry collections: Speculum with Broken Sleep Books in 2021, and Lapwing with Pavilion Poetry in 2024.[4] Speculum, her first collection which includes "[a] number of poems deal with childbirth and other pregnancy events, including maternal deaths", was praised for "a conversational style" and the poet's direct language.[7] It was also one of the Osmosis Picks of 2021 for, among other things, its "vivid imagery of gynaecological tools",[11] and the poet Rushika Wick called it "a research-based yet imaginative poetic exploration of the treatment of the female body through time" and praised Copley's "precise" writing.[12]
Lapwing, her second collection, was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, won the second prize as part of the Laurel Prize in 2024,[13] and was on the shortlist for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize,[14][15] judged by Mimi Khalvati (chair), Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan.[16] It is "a book that tries, through naming and through language, to bring back something, or someone, that is absent",[17] and has been praised as "a vivid and incantatory sequence."[18] Writing for the Times Literary Supplement, Lenni Sanders noted the poems in the collection present themselves as "historical documents or ornithologists' notes".[19] Writing for The Friday Poem, Matthew Paul called it "a creative enterprise", and said that it is "rooted in the mundane struggle for existence in Britain."[20] John Field, on the T. S. Eliot Prize website, notes that Lapwing is "a sombre skein of poems" exploring "the challenges of the natural world" and more.[21] Other reviews have called this "bleak yet beautiful bird biography" in the form of a poetry collection "ambitious"[22] and "a book about transformation." Dominic Leonard also praised Copley for successfully "contrasting the more imaginative and rich flights of language with blunt returns to earth".[23] Lapwing has also been praised for its "balancing act" where "the lapwing figure is anthropomorphised or a human being is birdified".[24]
Personal life
Copley is from Hertford, and has a daughter named Emmeline, who was born in 2017. She suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum during her pregnancy in 2016, and has written extensively about it. Her poem "Haworth, 1855", which was inspired by this "gruelling illness", won the YorkMix Poetry Prize in 2018.[1]
Works
- Speculum (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) ISBN 9781913642556
- Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry, LUP, 2024) ISBN 9781802074758
- Hertz, with Alycia Pirmohamed (Dialect Press, 2025)
Awards
- 2018: YorkMix / York Literature Festival Poetry Prize, for "Haworth, 1855"
- 2019: Newcastle Poetry Prize, for "Juice"
- 2024: Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation, for Lapwing
- 2024: Second Prize, Laurel Prize[25]
- 2024: Shortlisted, T.S. Eliot Prize[26][27]
References
- ^ a b Nicholson, David (27 March 2018). "York Literature Festival / YorkMix poetry competition 2018: Meet the winners". YorkMix. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Reading List: January 2020". Poetry Foundation. 28 January 2020. Retrieved 7 February 2026.
- ^ a b "Hannah Copley". T. S. Eliot Prize. 24 October 2024. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ a b "Hannah Copley – T.S. Eliot Writers' Notes". The Poetry School. 17 December 2024. Retrieved 20 December 2025.
- ^ a b "Dr Hannah Copley: Senior Lecturer". University of Westminster. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Dr Hannah Copley". WestminsterResearch, University of Westminster. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ a b Grant-Oyeye, Lind (April 2022). "Review: SMALL COMFORTS". The Poetry Ireland Review (136): 102–105. ISSN 0332-2998. JSTOR 27364017.
- ^ "2025 Festival Artists". StAnza – Scotland's International Poetry Festival. 17 February 2025. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Ware Poets 27th Annual Open Poetry Competition". Creative Writing Ink. 27 February 2025. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Books, words, writers and ideas: MK Literary Festival returns, 9 – 12 April 2025". Milton Keynes Citizen. Iconic Media Group Ltd. 4 March 2025. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Osmosis Picks of 2021". Osmosis Press. 22 December 2021. Retrieved 6 February 2025.
- ^ "Poetry News best books of the year". The Poetry Society. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "The Laurel prize 2024 – Winners!". Simon Armitage. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ El-Moudden, Yassin (13 January 2025). "'Transcendental beauty' of Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy wins him TS Eliot poetry prize". The Guardian. ISSN 1756-3224. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ Snow, Maia (1 October 2024). "T S Eliot Prize 2024 shortlist revealed". The Bookseller. ISSN 0006-7539. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Gizzi wins 2024 TS Eliot Prize". Books+Publishing. 15 January 2025. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Young Critics review 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist". The Poetry Society. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Meet Hannah Copley". The Poetry Book Society. 24 May 2024. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ Sanders, Lenni (9 May 2025). "Sightings". The Times Literary Supplement. ISSN 0307-661X. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ Paul, Matthew (28 March 2025). "Twig, feather, fluff, dried shit, corn husk, dried grass, clod". The Friday Poem. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ Field, John (11 February 2025). "Review of Lapwing". The T. S. Eliot Prize. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ Davey, Orla (3 January 2025). "Lapwing". Dundee University Review of the Arts (DURA). Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ Leonard, Dominic (1 February 2025). "'Song is a strong thing': On the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist". The London Magazine (Feb/Mar2025): 45–49. ISSN 0024-6085. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ Crucefix, Martyn (13 January 2025). "Impressions of the TS Eliot Prize Readings 2025". Martyn Crucefix. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "2024 Winners". Laurel Prize. 21 October 2024. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ Creamer, Ella (1 October 2024). "TS Eliot prize for poetry shortlist contains 'a strong strain of elegy'". The Guardian. ISSN 1756-3224. Retrieved 6 February 2026.
- ^ "Senior Lecturer Dr Hannah Copley shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry collection titled Lapwing". University of Westminster. 11 October 2024. Retrieved 6 February 2026.