Isabel Galleymore

Early life Galleymore is the daughter of the writer Nigel Tattersfield, who has published several books about the Tyne Valley-born engraver Thomas Bewick. Originally from Portsmouth, and born in South London in 1988, she spent much of her childhood between London and Portsmouth, and has since lived in Cornwall, Birmingham, Massachusetts, and elsewhere.

Education After studying English literature at University of Reading and creative writing at the University of St Andrews, she completed a PhD at the University of Exeter.

Career Galleymore is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Birmingham, UK. She has co-edited The Clearing, an online magazine of nature and place-based writing,

In 2012, she received a Hawthornden Fellowship to continue her work in environmental poetry and to write further versions after Francis Ponge. In 2022–23, she became the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, undertaking a project that explored the role of cuteness in environmental culture.

As someone feeding her "concern [about the environment] into much of her poetry", her work is frequently understood to be part of contemporary ecopoetics and nature writing. Writing on the topic of beauty, prettiness and wonder, Galleymore has asked "rather than cast them out of ecopoetic practice, could it be more productive to look deeply into them?". Several of her poems have been featured as "Poem of the week" in The Guardian, The Telegraph and Yorkshire Times. She has led workshops, including a poetry workshop on Diglis Island in 2019, been a guest reader at events, including the Sheaf (Digital) Poetry Festival 2020 and the Cheltenham Poetry Festival in 2024, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. In late 2023, she set and judged an ecopoetry challenge "about all things adorable" on The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network.

Galleymore has published two pamphlets of poetry: Dazzle Ship (Worple, 2014) and Cyanic Pollens (Guillemot, 2020). The poet Michael Laskey called Dazzle Ship a "first pamphlet by Isabel Galleymore that I wish I'd published." Cyanic Pollens was written in response to her time as poet-in-residence in the Peruvian Amazon. Writing about it for The Telegraph, Tristram Fane Saunders noted that few "young poets examine flora and fauna with a sharper eye than Isabel Galleymore." Significant Other, which was The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019 and a Telegraph Book of the Year 2019, was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection, the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize, and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. Poems in the collection, called "grounded in nature, earth, science and familiar human experience" and for moving between "the brutal tedium of reality" and "an evocative dreamscape full of magic and metamorphosis". Saunders suggests "Galleymore might be the first to probe the sex life of the slipper limpet", calling "a sequence of irregular sonnets about spineless sea-creatures" the "highlight" of Significant Other.

Her second collection, Baby Schema, which focusses on "the cute, the oh-so-precious, the vulnerably itty-bitty", Poet Billie Manning said that "Galleymore zooms right in on the [minute] details (a slug, a doll, a certain cartoon mouse)" in the book to move towards exploring "the big[ger] stuff: environmental care, late capitalism, the decision to have children." Baby Schema, which the poet Jo Clement praised for "attend[ing] to the subjects of extinction, overpopulation and capitalism", calling it "a triumph", was also a Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 2024, and was chosen as a Times Best Poetry Collection of 2024 for its "pin-sharp poetry of artificial things — teddy bears, sponges, dolls — that pricks any bubble of complacency or eco-smugness." a review suggests that the topics in the book "could be made more 'universal' and relatable". Writing about Baby Schema for LitHub after its US publication, the poet and critic Christopher Spaide called Galleymore "a whiz at changing scales".

Galleymore edited an anthology of children’s poems with Fran Long, titled The Bee Is Not Afraid Of Me: A Book of Insect Poems, which was published by The Emma Press in March 2021. In May 2021, AWW-STRUCK, containing a set of visual and page-based poems and critical essays themed around cuteness, was published by Poem Atlas (London), which she edited with Caroline Harris and Astra Papachristodoulou. Its publication was supported by Royal Holloway's Humanities and Arts Research Institute and the Animal Studies reading group at the University of Birmingham.

Works

Poetry Dazzle Ship (Worple, 2014) Significant Other (Carcanet, 2019) Cyanic Pollens (Guillemot Press, 2020) Baby Schema (Carcanet, 2024)

Scholarship Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)

As editor Frances Galleymore: Travelling Light (with Fred Beake, 2019) The Bee Is Not Afraid Of Me: A Book of Insect Poems (with Fran Long) (The Emma Press, 2021) AWW-STRUCK (with Caroline Harris and Astra Papachristodoulou) (Poem Atlas, 2021)

Awards 2015: Winner (First Prize), The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2019: Shortlisted, Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection, for Significant Other Tambopata Nature Reserve Residency, 2017 Gladstone's Library Writer in Residence, 2021 Walter Jackson Bate Fellow, 2022-23 AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, 2023