Janet Sutherland

In 2018 she participated in the Serbian Writers Association 55th Annual International gathering of poets where she read works translated by her translator, Ivanka Radmanovic, in libraries and other venues in Serbia. In the same year she read at the University of Debrecen in Hungary.

In 2017 she won the first prize in the Kent and Sussex Poetry competition. In 2018 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. She was awarded an Arts Council England Award in 2010, an Arts Council England Artists’ International Development Fund Award for travel to Hungary and Serbia in 2018, and an Authors’ Foundation grant from the Society of Authors in 2019. She has performed at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2008 and at the Nairn Literature Festival in 2019.

Since 2006 she has published four full-length collections of poetry, published by Shearsman Books. David Morley in Poetry Review said of her second collection, Hangmans's Acre, " Elizabeth Bishop’s attentiveness of voice hangs over this whole collection" and J Muckle said of her third collection, Bone Monkey, "Bone Monkey is a book that repays a reader's patience. Janet Sutherland is a fine poet". Hugh Dunkerley in The London Magazine said of Home Farm, her fourth collection, "At a time when both politics and performance poetry seem to be about who can shout loudest, Sutherland’s is a quiet and necessary voice".

In the early 1990s she took a ten-year break from writing. She began writing again, following a move to Lewes in East Sussex in 2001. From that time she has regularly contributed to a range of journals and anthologies, including Shearsman, Poetry Ireland Review, Molly Bloom, Litter, Poetry Review, The Spectator, The Rialto, New Statesman, Poetry Wales, Poetry Salzburg Review and The London Magazine.

Her early work (in the 1980s) appeared in magazines including Reality Studios, The Rialto and City Limits. Some recordings of her work from a live performance, from this period, are in the British Library sound collection. She was a poetry reviewer for City Limits in London, and other magazines in the 1980s.

In 1980 her essay 'Reznikoff and his Sources was published in Charles Reznokoff Man and Poet. This was subsequently reworked and published as an essay accompanying new editions of Reznikoff's cycle of poems, Holocaust.

Janet Sutherland (born 10 June 1957) is a British poet. She has four full-length collections of poetry, published by Shearsman Books. She is a full time working poet and editor. She is a co-founder of the Needlewriters cooperative which organises quarterly poetry events in Lewes, East Sussex. Her poems are widely anthologised and are published in national and international magazines.