Hannah Copley

Hannah Copley is a British poet and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. She is a poetry editor and director at the literary magazine Stand, and the author of two poetry collections, including Lapwing, which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, the second-place winner in the 2024 Laurel Prize, and was nominated for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize.

Education Copley was educated at the University of Leeds and has a BA in English and History and an MA in English Literature. Her doctoral studies on the poetry of Jon Silkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison in the School of English at Leeds was funded by an AHRC block grant.

Career Following her PhD, Copley has worked in small press publishing, taught Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she joined in 2018, and has taught at the University of Westminster since January 2019.

Copley has published work in Poetry, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, and elsewhere. She runs poetry events at the Soho Poly in London and is a poetry editor at Stand, where she first started as a student volunteer. and was one of the festival artists for StAnza in 2025. In 2025, she also judged the Ware Poets Open Competition.

Copley, noted as an "award-winning ecopoet", has authored two poetry collections: Speculum with Broken Sleep Books in 2021, and Lapwing with Pavilion Poetry in 2024. and the poet Rushika Wick called it "a research-based yet imaginative poetic exploration of the treatment of the female body through time" and praised Copley's "precise" writing.

Lapwing, her second collection, was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, won the second prize as part of the Laurel Prize in 2024, and was on the shortlist for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize, judged by Mimi Khalvati (chair), Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan. It is "a book that tries, through naming and through language, to bring back something, or someone, that is absent", and has been praised as "a vivid and incantatory sequence." Writing for the Times Literary Supplement, Lenni Sanders noted the poems in the collection present themselves as "historical documents or ornithologists' notes". Writing for The Friday Poem, Matthew Paul called it "a creative enterprise", and said that it is "rooted in the mundane struggle for existence in Britain." John Field, on the T. S. Eliot Prize website, notes that Lapwing is "a sombre skein of poems" exploring "the challenges of the natural world" and more. Other reviews have called this "bleak yet beautiful bird biography" in the form of a poetry collection "ambitious" and "a book about transformation." Dominic Leonard also praised Copley for successfully "contrasting the more imaginative and rich flights of language with blunt returns to earth". Lapwing has also been praised for its "balancing act" where "the lapwing figure is anthropomorphised or a human being is birdified".

Personal life Copley is from Hertfordshire, and has two children. She suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum during her pregnancy in 2016, and has written extensively about it. Her poem "Haworth, 1855", which was inspired by this "gruelling illness", won the YorkMix Poetry Prize in 2018.

Works Speculum (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry, LUP, 2024) Hertz, with Alycia Pirmohamed (Dialect Press, 2025)

Awards 2018: YorkMix / York Literature Festival Poetry Prize, for "Haworth, 1855" 2019: Newcastle Poetry Prize, for "Juice" 2024: Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation, for Lapwing 2024: Second Prize, Laurel Prize 2024: Shortlisted, T.S. Eliot Prize