Alison Brackenbury

Alison Brackenbury (born 1953 ) is a British poet. She has published ten full-length collections of poetry and two selected volumes, as well as reviews, articles, and radio broadcasts. She has won the Eric Gregory Award and the Cholmondeley Award.

Life Brackenbury was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire and attended the local village school and then Brigg High School. She studied English at St Hugh's College, Oxford.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Brackenbury worked as a librarian in a technical college and as a clerical assistant. From 1990 to 2012, when she retired, she was a director, bookkeeper, and manual worker in her family's metal finishing firm. It was selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 1982, it won an Eric Gregory Award, given for collections by poets under the age of thirty.

Between 1985 and 1995, Carcanet published three new collections by Brackenbury, plus a Selected Poems in 1991.

Brackenbury published four further collections with Carcanet between 2000 and 2016. In 2019, Carcanet published a second volume of selected poems, Gallop.

Brackenbury's most recent collection was Thorpeness, in 2022.

Brackenbury's work has appeared in many journals, including the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Stand, and PN Review, where she has been published multiple times since her first appearance in 1980. Her poetry has also been broadcast on BBC radio.

In 2019, Brackenbury selected poems for and introduced the Candlestick Press anthology Ten Poems about Horses.

Awards 1981 Poetry Book Society Recommendation 1982 Eric Gregory Award 1997 Cholmondeley Award

Works Books

Select journal publications "In the gap"; "Affairs"; "Plucked from", The Chimera, October 2007 "When"; "Mud"; "March ending"; "Passing", nthposition, March 2008 "6.25", The Guardian, 2 February 2008