Julia Copus

Julia Copus FRSL (born 1969) is a British poet, biographer and children's writer.

Early life and education

Copus was born in London and grew up with three brothers, two of whom went on to become musicians. She attended The Mountbatten School, a comprehensive in Romsey, and Peter Symonds Sixth Form College in Winchester. She went on to study Latin at St Mary's College, Durham.

Career

Copus' books of poetry include The Shuttered Eye (Bloodaxe, 1995), which won her an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the pamphlet Walking in the Shadows (1994), which won the Poetry Business competition, In Defence of Adultery (Bloodaxe, 2003), The World's Two Smallest Humans (Faber, 2012), shortlisted for both the Costa Book Award for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Girlhood (Faber 2019), winner of the inaugural Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. in which the second half of the poem mirrors the first, using the same lines but in reverse order and differently punctuated.

Eenie Meenie Macka Racka (an original 45-minute play for radio) was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September, 2003, having been commissioned after Copus won the BBC's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for Best New Radio Playwright in 2002. In the same year, she won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition with Breaking the Rule.

Copus was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and the following year was made an RLF Advisory Fellow and awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Exeter. In 2010, she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for An Easy Passage, and in 2020 her collection Girlhood was awarded the inaugural Derek Walcott Prize for best collection by a non-US citizen. She has been on the judging panel for a number of literary prizes, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Costa Book Award, the UK's National Poetry Competition, the Encore Award for best second novel, the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry and the Tower Poetry Competition for 16-18 year olds, run by Christ Church, Oxford. 2014 Authors' Foundation Grant (Society of Authors) 2018 Inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, for Girlhood 2023–2024 Royal Literary Fund Fellow, V&A Museum and Science Museum Group 2024 Cholmondeley Award