Alison Brackenbury was born in 1953. She grew up in a Lincolnshire village which, like her grandparents, managed to stay close to Victorian England, while also watching Top of the Pops. She has published nine collections of poems with Carcanet, which have won an Eric Gregory and a Cholmondeley Award. Her poems have made frequent excursions on to Radios 3 and 4. She is glad that Dot, her grandmother, and the subject of her HappenStance book Aunt Margaret's Pudding, did not see the brandy snaps which she made for a Christmas party at work in 1982.
Alison confesses to spending a significant amount of time on social media. For twenty years, she has been fascinated by the possibilities of sending poems out into the world through the ever-changing corridors of cyberspace. Her website, with blogs, brand-new poems, and a precious Contact page, can be found at www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk. She is on Facebook as Alison Brackenbury, and has a Facebook Group called ‘Poems from Alison’, which sends out a free new poem every couple of months.
She is also enthusiastic about Twitter, where she posts (often crooked) photographs of the flowers, birds and hills of Gloucestershire, where she still spends much time. On Twitter, she is @ABRACKENBURY (she left Capitals Lock on, while registering at 2 a.m.). She has also ventured onto Instagram, whose standards she persistently lowers with more crooked photographs, sometimes of richly old-fashioned trifles, and appealing, time-devouring cats. On Instagram, she is alisonbrackenbury2 (something went wrong with account number one – probably through haste). But, in all her amateur corners of the Web, you will find poems, which, luckily, keep their own time.
Her most recent Carcanet collection, purely of poems, is Skies, 2016.
HappenStance publications
- Aunt Margaret's Pudding, 2018 (a short book of poems, recipes and memoir)
- Shadow, 2009 (pamphlet)
