James Byrne is a British poet and Editor of The Wolf magazine [1]. He was born in Buckinghamshire in 1977[2] and his first book of poems Passages of Time was published in 2002 and included some of his earliest poems. A second collection, Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc Publications in November 2009. [3]. For many years James has been consistently talked of as 'one of the leading poets of his generation', endorsed by The Times as one of the 'ten rising stars of British poetry' in April 2009.[4]
In 2008, James won the Treci Trg poetry festival prize in Serbia.[5] In 2009 his New and Selected Poems: The Vanishing House was published by Treci Trg (in a bilingual edition) in Belgrade. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, an anthology of British poets, under 35, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. [6] Since becoming sole editor of The Wolf in April 2006, James has broadened the international reach of the magazine and this has affected some of his editorial work. He is currently working on an anthology of Burmese poetry entitled Bones Will Crow: 14 contemporary Burmese poets (forthcoming from Arc in June 2012) and lives in England again after two years in New York City, where he received a Stein scholarship and an MFA from New York University.
James's poems have been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Serbian and French. In 2009 he was invited by the British Council in Damascus to participate in the Al-Sendian arts festival in Syria, where he read to over 1,000 people. James is also a notable promoter of poetry, for many years co-hosting New Blood, an event for young poets and organising events for The Wolf, including national and international tours. In 2004 he worked for the 'World Poets' Tour' for the Poetry Translation Centre. Since 2002 James has interviewed many poets for The Wolf,[7], including Charles Simic, Robin Robertson, Penelope Shuttle and Alfred Corn. He is also a notable reviewer, publishing critical prose recently in Poetry Review.
The poet John Kinsella wrote on the jacket for his most recent book: ‘James Byrne is a phenomenon and Blood/Sugar is astonishing. Byrne has a razor-sharp wit, an acute intellect and a superb facility with language. The poetry he writes is both culturally and intellectually ‘learned’, but also rhetorically and lyrically confident. He is a complete original.’
His partner is Sandeep Parmar, also a poet, a modernist scholar and Reviews Editor for The Wolf. They live together in Cambridge where Byrne is Poet in Residence at Clare Hall.