Thursday 20th March at 7pm. Venue: Rossiter Books, Ross on Wye. Ticket £6

Fiona Sampson is a leading British poet, literary biographer and writer about place. She will talk about her latest book, Limestone Country, a meditation on the meaning of place, how we shape it and how it shapes us.
Limestone Country is a perceptive, lyrical evocation and investigation into four landscapes in Europe and beyond. Seemingly disparate these places are bound together by their limestone geology, by personal experience and Fiona Sampson’s unique imagination. Limestone Country delves deep into the heart of these landscapes: the people, wildlife and culture, told through vivid snapshots of daily life, farming routines and encounters with the wild.
Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, literary biographer and writer about place. Her most seventh and most recent poetry collection, Come Down (2021), received the European Lyric Atlas Prize, Naim Frashëri Laureateship, and Wales Poetry Book of the Year. Awarded an MBE for services to literature by the Queen, as well as a Cholmondeley Award, the Newdigate Prize, and multiple awards each from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, the Society of Authors, Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Poetry Book Society, her work has received multiple Book of the Year selections. She has been translated into 38 languages and been honoured with international prizes in the US, Bosnia, India, France, Albania and North Macedonia. Her 24 books to date include the monographs Beyond the Lyric (Penguin 2012) and Lyric Cousins (2016), and she edited the Faber Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her study of Limestone Country was Guardian Book of the Year. The critically acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley was followed by Two-Way Mirror: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Washington Post Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize and PEN’s International Biography Prize. Also a critic, broadcaster and librettist, collaborating frequently with musicians and visual artists, she edited the UK’s national periodical of record, Poetry Review, from 2005-12. She recently co-authored Collaborative Poetry Translation (Routledge), serves internationally on literary juries and the boards of publishing houses and literary NGOs, has founded and directed an international poetry festival, was a Council member of the Royal Society of Literature, and is Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. She is Professor Emerita of Poetry at the University of Roehampton, and Fellow of Royal Society of Literature and of the British Trust for Literary Romanticism. She’s at work on a biography of George Sand (for Penguin and Norton) and a study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (for Princeton).