Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson MBE
Fiona Sampson
Occupation	Poet and writer
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Royal Academy of Music; University of Oxford, University of Nijmegen
Period	contemporary

Fiona Ruth Sampson, MBE is a British poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing.

Sampson was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, and following a brief career as a concert violinist, studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize. She gained a PhD in the philosophy of language from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She advises internationally on creative writing in healthcare, a field whose development she pioneered in a number of projects and publications. As a young poet she was the founder-director of Poetryfest – the Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival and the founding editor of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from Europe. She has received a number of international writers' fellowships: I.A. Literary Association, Skojcan, Slovenia, 2015, Greek Writers’ Union Writers’ and Translators’ House, Paros, 2011, Estonian Writers’ Union House, Kasmu, 2009, Heinrich Boll House, Achill Island, 2005, Fundacion Valparaiso, Spain, 2002, Hawthornden Castle, 2001, Fondacion da Casa de Mateus, Portugal, 2001. She held an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University 2002-5, a CAPITAL Fellowship in Creativity at the University of Warwick 2007-8 and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, Institute of Musical Research & Institute of English Studies: 2012-15.

From 2005-12, Sampson was the editor of Poetry Review, the oldest and most widely read poetry journal in the UK. She was the first woman editor of the journal since Muriel Spark (1947–49). In January 2013 she founded Poem, a quarterly international review, published by the University of Roehampton, where Sampson is Professor of Poetry and the Director of Roehampton Poetry Centre.

She lives in Herefordshire.

Sampson has published twenty-nine books, including collections of poetry, volumes on the philosophy of language and on the writing process. She has written prose on place, literary criticism - she contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times The Independent, the Times Literary Supplement and the Sunday Times - and biography. She has developed a special interest in the Romantics, editing the Faber Poet to Poet edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley (see below), and being commissioned to write a biography of Mary Shelley "On the White Plain" (Profile, 2018) and a study of the way the Romantics shaped British attitudes to the landscape, "The Everlasting Universe of Things" (Crowood, 2019).

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