Paul Farley

Paul Farley studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is poetry and belletristic literature. Employment is recorded with University of Lancaster. Distinctions recorded are E. Forster Award, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Geoffrey Dearmer Award and Somerset Maugham Award.

• Name — Paul Farley • Honorific Suffix — FRSL • Born — 1965 • Birthplace — Liverpool, England • Occupation — Poet Broadcaster • Alma Mater — Chelsea College of Art & Design • Subject — Poetry

Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965. He studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art, and has lived in London, Brighton and Cumbria. Farley's first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998) won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1998, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. The book also gained him the Somerset Maugham Award, and in 1999 he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. From 2000 to 2002, he was the poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. His second collection, The Ice Age (2002), received the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 2004, Farley was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. His third collection, Tramp in Flames (2006), was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. A poem from the collection, ‘Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second’, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem. The same year he also published a study of Terence Davies' film, Distant Voices, Still Lives. In 2007, he edited a selection of John Clare for Faber's Poet to Poet series. As a broadcaster Farley has made many arts features and documentary programmes for radio and television, as well as original radio dramas, and his poems for radio are collected in Field Recordings: BBC Poems 1998-2008. He makes regular appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review, Front Row and BBC Radio 3's The Verb, and he presented the contemporary poetry programme The Echo Chamber on Radio 4 from 2012 to 2018. Farley's book Edgelands, a non-fiction journey into England's overlooked wilderness (co-authored with Michael Symmons Roberts) was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. It received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award 2012, and was serialised as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His fourth collection, The Dark Film, was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2012. In 2009, Farley received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012. Farley currently lives in Lancashire and is Professor of Poetry at Lancaster University. His fifth collection, The Mizzy, was shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award and the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize. His sixth collection, When It Rained for a Million Years, was shortlisted for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize.

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• British Council -- Contemporary Writers: Paul Farley • Poetry Archive--Profile, including audio clips • Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including video clip • Keynote speech at the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize awards gala, including video clips • Granta 102: The New Nature Writing • The Guardian: In conversation: Mark Haddon and Paul Farley • 57 Productions: Interview • 57 Productions: Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second • Intelligent Life: Interview • The Observer: Once upon a life