Julia Copus

Julia Copus, 2007

Julia Copus was born in London, and is a British poet, children's writer and radio dramatist.[1][2]

Career

Copus' books of poetry include The Shuttered Eye (Bloodaxe, 1995), which won her an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, In Defence of Adultery (Bloodaxe, 2003) and The World's Two Smallest Humans (Faber, 2012), shortlisted for both the Costa Book Awards (poetry category) and the T.S. Eliot Prize.[1] All three collections are Poetry Book Society Recommendations.

Eenie Meenie Macka Racka (an original 45-minute play for radio) was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September, 2003, having been commissioned after Copus won the BBC's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for Best New Radio Playwright in 2002. In the same year she won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition with Breaking the Rule.

In 2001, she received writing awards from the Arts Council of England and the Authors’ Foundation, and in 2003, she collaborated with sculptor Stephen Broadbent to produce a poem inscribed on a bronze bench and sculpture in Fleming Square, Blackburn.

In the summer of 2004, Copus was commissioned to write a poem for St. Dunstan's, Brighton, as part of the Architexts project, administered by David Kendall for the Arts Council. She was awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the University of Exeter in 2005, 2006 and 2007. The following year she was made an RLF Advisory Fellow and awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Exeter. In 2010, she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for An Easy Passage.

A concise writing guide for undergraduates called "Essential Writing Tips" was published by Macmillan in July 2009, and has subsequently been made into an audiobook.

A sequence of poems for radio, Ghost Lines, based on the experience of IVF treatment, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 2011 and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

Copus has also written two picture books: Hog in the Fog (Faber 2014) and The Hog, the Shrew and the Hullabaloo (Faber 2015).

Publications

Poetry collections

For children

Non-fiction

Audio

Awards

References

External links