Fiona Sampson is a poet, literary biographer and writer about life and place. A former professional violinist, she has a PhD in applied philosophy of language and is Professor Emerita of Poetry, University of Roehampton.
As a Romanticist, she edited Faber’s ‘Poet to Poet’ edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2011). Her critically acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley: the girl who wrote Frankenstein (2018) was followed by Two-Way Mirror: the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (W.W. Norton 2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Washington Post Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize and US PEN’s international biography prize. Becoming George, a biography of George Sand (Transworld and W.W. Norton) is in press and due to appear in 2026, and her study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau for Princeton University Press is forthcoming in 2028.
Her seventh and most recent collection of ecologically informed poetry, Come Down (2021), received the European Lyric Atlas Prize, Naim Frashëri Laureateship, and Wales Poetry Book of the Year. Her work has been translated into 38 languages, and been honoured with international prizes in the US, Bosnia, India, France, Albania and North Macedonia, as well as in the UK – where it’s also received critical attention and numerous Book of the Year commendations. Further writing about place includes her book length essay on Limestone Country (a Guardian Nature Book of the Year), and Starlight Wood: Walking back to the Romantic countryside (Hachette 2022). In 2025 she will complete work on Green Thought: Ecology as Political Philosophy (Verso, 2026).
Fiona’s thirty books to date also include a study of contemporary British poetics, Beyond the Lyric (Penguin 2012), and Lyric Cousins (2016), a monograph on poetry and musical form. Among edited volumes are a centenary anthology of Poetry Review – the periodical which she edited for seven years – and a handbook on Creative Writing in Health and Social Care, a field in which she worked for some years.
Also a critic, broadcaster and librettist, she collaborates with musicians and visual artists and in translation: she coauthored Collaborative Poetry Translation: Processes, Priorities and Relationships in the Poettrio Method (Routledge 2024), serves internationally on literary juries and the boards of publishing houses and literary NGOs, and founded and directed an international poetry festival. A former Council member of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund.
