About

Short: Sarah Hesketh is a writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry collections Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf (Penned in the Margins, 2009) and The Hard Word Box (Penned in the Margins, 2014), and the editor of The Emma Press Anthology of Age (2015). She has been an Artist in Residence with Age Concern and The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Her work has a focus on socially engaged writing practices. She currently lives in London and works as Managing Editor for Modern Poetry in Translation.

Sarah was brought up in Pendle, East Lancashire. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and a PhD from the University of Roehampton in interview-based creative composition. Her first full collection of poetry Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf, was published in 2009 by Penned in the Margins and was highly commended in the Forward Prize 2010. In 2013 she was poet in residence with Age Concern working with elderly people with dementia, and in 2014 she published The Hard Word Box (Penned in the Margins, 2014), a collection of poems and interviews inspired by this experience. The book was longlisted for the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize. She is the editor of The Emma Press Anthology of Age. In 2015, she was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to produce ‘Grains of Light’, a sequence of poems based around the story of Holocaust survivor Eve Kugler. Her collaborations include working with composer Alastair Caplin at the 2007 Leeds Lieder Festival, and work with the Modern Fairies Collective. Her text/art piece ‘my little flicker’ was shown at Plathfest in 2022.

For five years she was the Assistant Director at the literature and free speech charity English PEN and she has worked as a freelance project manager for organisations including the Poetry Translation Centre, The Reading Agency and Free Word, managing projects including World Book Night and International Translation Day.  From 2015-17 she developed and co-managed the Mixed Borders Residency for London Parks and Gardens Trust. In 2014 she was shortlisted for the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize which recognises the achievements and celebrates the promise of women in the publishing industry. From 2017-2020 she served on the Society of Authors' Poetry and Spoken Word Committee. She was co-Artistic Director of Winchester Poetry Festival from 2017-2019.

She currently lives in London and works as Managing Editor for Modern Poetry in Translation magazine, as well as teaching creative writing for the Open University. She is workshop leader for the ‘Occupations and Interruptions - a Poetry Workshop for Carers’ at Oxford Brookes University.