Poet-in-residence - Heidi Williamson

Heidi Williamson is our virtual poet-in-residence for 2008.

Heidi has lived in Stirling, Brussels, and Salisbury and currently lives Norfolk.

Her poems have been used in schools in Norfolk to stimulate discussion around science, and she was a guest reader at the 2006 BAA Science Festival. She’s a participant in the ‘Science, Art and Writing’ initiative for schoolchildren.

More widely, her poems have appeared in NHS waiting rooms, at the Salisbury Festival, on well known poet’s blogs, and in many respected journals including The Rialto, Smiths Knoll, Mslexia, Orbis, Poetry News, South, Guardian online and others. She’s currently collating her first collection.

“What I find rewarding about Williamson’s work is her dedication in pursuing meaning, in teasing out all the implications of her lines of enquiry. Like the scientists she admires and whose discoveries inform some of her work, Williamson knows that poetry is a means of investigation, rigorous and disciplined… form itself becomes a means of discovery… as with the best experiments, Williamson’s poems… celebrate the world as well as interrogate it”.

Esther Morgan, Editor, The Poetry Archive

“I am a great admirer of Heidi’s poetry and find her fascination with science very exciting. There isn’t enough high quality poetry that is empathetic to science around and the value of her approach extends well beyond poetry.”

Professor Anne Osbourn, founder of SAW Trust

“Heidi Williamson… understands uncertainty and loss, as well as the trace loss leaves behind as memory… The sensuousness of language is asserted… through tender explorations of our haunted fabric.”

George Szirtes, T.S Eliot Prize winner, Professor of Creative Writing, UEA