Julia Copus

Julia Copus FRSL (born 1969) is a British poet, radio dramatist and children's writer.

Julia Copus
Julia Copus, 2007
BornLondon, England, United Kingdom
OccupationPoet
NationalityBritish
EducationDurham University
Notable awardsEric Gregory Award
Website
Official website

Biography

Julia Copus was born in London and grew up with three brothers, two of which went on to become musicians.[1] She attended Mountbatten School, a large comprehensive in Romsey, and Peter Symonds Sixth Form College.[2] She went on to study Latin at Durham University.[3]

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, the pamphlet Walking in the Shadows (1994), which won the Poetry Business competition,[4] In Defence of Adultery (Bloodaxe, 2003), The World's Two Smallest Humans (Faber, 2012), shortlisted for both the Costa Book Awards (poetry category) and the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Girlhood (Faber 2019), winner of the inaugural Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry.[5] She is known for establishing a new form in English poetry, which she has called the specular form, in which the second half of the poem mirrors the first, using the same lines but in reverse order and differently punctuated.[5]

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'.[6]

Copus was awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the University of Exeter in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and the following year 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'. She has served on the judging panel for a number of literary prizes, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Costa Book Award, Encore Award and T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry.[6]

Copus has also written four picture books: Hog in the Fog (Faber 2014), The Hog, The Shrew and the Hullabaloo (Faber 2015), The Shrew that Flew (Faber 2016) and My Bed is an Air Balloon (Faber 2018).[6]

Personal life

She lives in Curry Mallet, with her husband, Andrew Stevenson.

Publications

Poetry collections

For children

As editor

Non-fiction

For radio
  • Eenie Meenie Macka Racka, afternoon play, BBC Radio 4, September 2003
  • The Enormous Radio (based on the short story by John Cheever), afternoon play, BBC Radio 4, July 2008
  • Ghost Lines, a sequence of poems for radio, BBC Radio 3, December 2011

Audio

Selected awards

References
  1. "Julia Copus | poetryarchive.org". www.poetryarchive.org. Retrieved 30 August 2019.
  2. https://www.juliacopus.com/writer-biography/becoming-writer/
  3. "Julia Copus b 1969". Poetry Archive. Retrieved 11 September 2018.
  4. "Julia Copus - Literature". literature.britishcouncil.org. Retrieved 30 August 2019.
  5. The Poetry Society (Julia Copus, Apna Ghar Age Concern)
  6. "Julia Copus". Poem Hunter. Retrieved 11 September 2018.
  7. Alison Flood (23 October 2012). "TS Eliot prize for poetry announces 'fresh, bold' shortlist". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 October 2012.


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