U.A.  Fanthorpe

U. A. Fanthorpe (1929-2009) was born in Kent and read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, before training as a teacher. She was Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and then ‘became a middle-aged drop-out in order to write’, publishing her first collection, Side Effects, in 1978. Her eight volumes of poetry were all published by Peterloo, and her Selected Poems was published by Penguin in 1986. Enitharmon Press publish her Christmas Poems and From Me to You, love poems by Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey and will be publishing her New and Collected Poems in July 2010. In 1994 U. A. Fanthorpe was the first woman to be nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. She was awarded the CBE in 2001 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2003, when her Collected Poems were published.