Born Judith Arundell Wright, 31st May 1915 in NSW Australia, she was one of Australia’s foremost poets and writer of short stories and children’s books.  She spent much of her childhood in Brisbane and after the death of her mother, Ethel, was a boarder of a girls school in New England.  After graduating she studied […]

Antonio Machado came into the world in Seville, southern Spain in 1875.  He was one of two brothers, only a year apart, and their father moved the family to Madrid when Antonio was 8 years old. While studying, with his older brother, at “Institución Libre de Enseñanza”,  Antonio found he had a talent for writing […]

Here is a man, born in the year 1503, into one of the most turbulent times in English history, at Allington Castle in Kent.  His father, Henry, was able to live in such a grand location due to his position as a Privy Councillor to King Henry VII and he continued in this role when […]

Now here is a curious thing:  how can a man who was once appointed poet laureate of all England, succeeding no less than Alfred, Lord Tennyson by the way, be considered (in some quarters) to be “the worst and least read English poet”?  That is what happened to Alfred Austin in 1896, a man who […]

Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles into a working class New York family in June 1936.  Her father was a steel worker and her mother bore six children.  Graduating from High School Lucille won a scholarship to Howard University and then studied at the State University of New York at Fredonia, quite close to […]