Selima Hill

Selima Hill (born 13 October 1945) is a British poet. She has published twenty poetry collections since 1984. Her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the most important British poetry awards: the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She was selected as recipient of the 2022 King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Early life and education Selima Hill was born 13 October, 1945 in Hampstead, England to a family of artists. Her parents and her grandparent were painters. She lived in rural England and Wales when she was young. Hill attended boarding school and later won a scholarship to study Moral Sciences at New Hall, Cambridge University. She attended Cambridge from 1965 to 1967.

Career Hill's first poetry collection, Saying Hello at the Station (Chatto & Windus), was published in 1984. Selima Hill won first prize in the 1988 Arvon Foundation/Observer International Poetry Competition for her long poem, The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness, and her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. Her poetry collection, Bunny (2001), a series of poems about a young girl growing up in the 1950s, won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Choice.

Later poetry collections are The Hat (2008); Fruitcake (2009); People Who Like Meatballs (2012), shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award; The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism (2014); Jutland (2015), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation which was shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize and was earlier shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize; The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016), shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017; Splash like Jesus (2017); and I May Be Stupid But I'm Not That Stupid (2019). Her latest collection, Men Who Feed Pigeons, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2021 and shortlisted for both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes.

Hill was awarded a 1991 Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, was writer-in-residence at the Royal Festival Hall in 1992, and at the Science Museum in London in 1996. She taught at the Poetry School and Poetry Library in London in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hill was awarded a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Exeter (2003—2006)."

Hill has also taught creative writing in hospitals and prisons.

Critique Poet Fiona Sampson says of her work, "Selima Hill's 1984 collection Saying Hello at the Station introduced arguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry since Sylvia Plath. In the quarter-century since that debut, her voice has deepened and strengthened as its subject matter has widened from bereavement and life in a psychiatric unit to more general difficulties with men, family relationships, and the business of living. The simultaneous publication of Hill's new collection The Hat, and a Selected Poems, Gloria, is the perfect moment to rediscover this inimitably exhilarating poet".

Awards and honours 1986: Cholmondeley Award 1988: Arvon Foundation/Observer International Poetry Competition, 1st prize 2022: King's Gold Medal for Poetry

Selected works

Jumping Over Trees: Poems from the Poetry Library, London. The Poetry Library and Royal Festival Hall Education, 2000.