CSL poets Antony Dunn, Andrew McMillan, John Siddique and Emma Conally-Barklem share work discussing illness and ageing, despair and joy, and how the act of writing itself can be healing.

Antony Dunn

Antony Dunn has published four collections of poems, Pilots and Navigators (Oxford University Press), Flying Fish (Carcanet OxfordPoets), Bugs (Carcanet OxfordPoets) and Take This One to Bed (Valley Press).

Winner of the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, he edited and introduced Ex Libris, a posthumous collection of poems by David Hughes (Valley Press).

Antony is a regular tutor for The Poetry School and the Arvon Foundation. He has worked on a number of translation projects with poets from Holland, Hungary, Israel and China.

He has been Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York and the People Powered Press. Until 2018 he was Artistic Director of the Bridlington Poetry Festival.

Antony lives in Leeds.

Andrew McMillan

Andrew McMillan’s debut collection physicalwas the only ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation forAutumn 2015. In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, a Poetry Book of the Month in both The Observerand The Telegraph, a Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times and won the inaugural Polari Prize. His third collection, pandemonium, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021, and 100 Queer Poems, the acclaimed anthology he edited with Mary Jean Chan, was published by Vintage in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards.Physical has been translated into French, Galician, German and Norwegian editions, with a double-edition of physical &playtimepublished in Slovak in 2022. He is Professor of Contemporary Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut novel, Pity, was published by Canongate in 2024, and was named as one of the top 20 books of 2024 by The Independent. It has been translated into numerous languages including Norwegian, Swedish, French, German, Turkish and Slovak.

John Siddique

John Siddique is an author and sacred teacher. He has written nine books of poetry and non-fiction, including the recent ‘Signposts of The Spiritual Journey’and ‘SO’. John is also the Project Co-ordinator for the Royal Literary Fund & WritersMosaicin The North of England. He has been featured in Time, The Guardian, Granta, The Bookseller,CNN and the BBC,and his meditations and teachings have connected with millions of people globally, offering deep insight into the nature of life and self-discovery. He has served as Canterbury Laureate and British Council Poet-in-Residence at CSU-Los Angeles. He is also an Honorary Writing Fellow at Leicester University.

Emma Conally-Barklem

Emma Conally-Barklem is an author, poet, creative writing facilitator and yoga teacher based in Yorkshire. In 2023, she was New Northern Poet for Ilkley Literature Festival. She curated her first poetry collection ‘The Ridings’ into a photography and poetry exhibition based on her own family life, ‘The Ridings: Bradford Working-Class Family Life, Loss & Landscape: 1970’s-1990’s’ at South Square Gallery in her hometown of Bradford. ‘Hymns from the Sisters’ was written after a residency at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Emma won the Black in White Poetry Prize 2024. Her first novel, ‘Yoga Homicide’ was shortlisted for the 2024 Book Edit Writers’ Prize. Her third poetry collection ‘Emily Brontë’s Hawk’ will be published by The Black Cat Poetry Press in 2026.