Ben Wilkinson

“I can’t make you feel what I felt” (David Foster Wallace), one of the epigraphs to Ben Wilkinson’s For Real, is a challenge to which Wilkinson rises with considerable success. His poems are like doors “where no door was bricked up”; they frequently make us wonder how he got through. The same is true of his translations, especially “October”, a fresh and convincing version of Verlaine. - Andrew McCullouch, The Times Literary Supplement

Whenever I read Ben Wilkinson’s work I find myself admiring his craft. It carries a precision of thought and expression that’s hard to reproduce, in a syntax which is natural and a voice which is easy to hear, yet the poems abound with subtly used devices and effects. Wilkinson disguises his full-rhymes with enjambment, so the audience experience both form and ‘natural flow’ at the same time. He’s always conscious of form, but rarely lets form dictate to him. - Noel Williams, Antiphon

Ben Wilkinson (born 1985 in Stafford, England) is a British poet, academic, and critic for The Guardian. He completed his first degree at the University of Sheffield, and his MA and PhD at Sheffield Hallam University. In 2014, he won both the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition and a New Writing North Northern Writers' Award. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Bolton and lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He is a keen amateur distance runner and has written variously on the subject.