David Morley

David Morley

David Morley (b. 1964, Blackpool) writes to give a voice to the voiceless or spoken-over; the British Gypsy boxer Tyson Fury (the source of his collection’s title, FURY), the midges at Innominate Tarn, the evicted traveller communities at Dale Farm. Many poems feature words of Angloromani, the mixed language spoken by British Romani; their anger is tempered by a sense of joy in the vast potentialities of speech and oral tradition. Morley grew up with a stammer, which he has described as a ‘merciless muse’: ‘My teenage mind developed into a thesaurus of tensioned, alert possibility: hundreds of synonyms and antonyms allowed me to find the path of least resistance through sentences.’

In 2017, Morley’s Selected Poems, The Invisible Gift, won the Ted Hughes Award.

Hear David Morley read on The Poetry Archive.
Read more about David Morley’s work on Poetry International Web.

Forward Prizes History:

• 2020 Forward Prize for Best collection, shortlisted for FURY (Carcanet)