NEWS

​We are thrilled to annouce Fiona Sampson as the Judge of 2022’s Keats-Shelley and Young Romantics Prizes. An award-winning poet and biographer, Fiona is the perfect Chair of the Judging Panels for both the poetry and essay competitions in this bicentenary year of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death.

Here too we could not have found a better writer: Fiona’s 2018 biography of Mary Shelley (‘The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein’) earned rapturous reviews and a place on non-fiction bestseller lists. She has also edited Shelley’s poems for Faber & Faber. Another book about the Romantic age, examining its impact on rural life and thought, is due out next year.

​Fiona began her artistic career in music: she trained at the Royal Academy of Music as a violinist. Having retired early as a professional musician, she studied at Oxford University where she won the prestigious Newdigate Poetry Prize, which launched her in a new and more literary direction. Her prolific and diverse career has combined poetry (she has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Forward Prizes), prose (her most recent biography, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was published in 2021), translation and everything from editing Poetry Review to running literary festivals.

Fiona is a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2017 was awarded the MBE for services to literature.

You can read more about Fiona at our Keats-Shelley Prize pages or www.fionasampson.co.uk