| Fiona Sampson's background in music forms an important part of her poetic voice. Leaving school at sixteen to study the violin in Salzburg, Paris, Gstaad and London, she worked as a soloist and chamber musician into her early twenties. She then took up residencies which pioneered writing in health and social care: work for which she is now internationally recognised. She studied at the Universities of Oxford, where she won the Newdigate Prize, and Nijmegen, gaining a PhD in the philosophy of language. This work led to a series of books on the writing process, from the academic - Writing: Self and Reflexivity, and Writing: Self on the Page, both with Celia Hunt - to the practical: Writing in Health and Social Care and The Healing Word.
She has been widely translated, with eight books in translation including Patuvachki Dnevnik, awarded the 2004 Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia). Her own translations include Jaan Kaplinski and Amir Or. A specialist in the literatures of Eastern Europe, she founded and edited Orient Express (2002-5), a magazine of contemporary writing from that region. In 2005 she became the first female editor of Poetry Review for sixty years. As a critic, she contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times and other publications.
Fiona Sampson's second collection, Folding the Real appeared in 2001. She held a three-year AHRC Fellowship at the Poetry Centre, Oxford Brookes (2002-2005) to write the verse novel The Distance Between Us. Here, distance isn't purely geographical: dream-like poems speak of the distances within relationships. In Common Prayer, short-listed for the 2007 TS Eliot Prize, precise and musical language meditates on everyday and inner landscapes. 'Trumpledor Beach', short-listed for the 2006 Forward Prize for best single poem, moves from deckchairs and coke tins to self awareness. Sampson uses white space - varying degrees of silence - to create "the stretched line of attention holding itself".
Fiona Sampson has said that, while she enjoyed her career as a performer, poetry enables her to 'say more.' In 2007-2008 she used a Fellowship at the University of Warwick to examine the relationship between poetry and music. She has also collaborated with visual artists. A recent volume of essays, On Listening, articulates the importance she gives to paying attention. The recordings she has made for the Poetry Archive bear this out. Using her voice as an instrument to release the music of her lines, and the charged spaces between them, Sampson lifts her words from the score of the page and allows them to live in our heads.
1 *Fog-bound 4.47
2 *The Dream of the Monstrance 0.57
3 *The Plunge 3.45
4 *Attitudes of Prayer 2.53
5 *World Asleep 1.01
6 **Draft for a Short Fiction 2.16
7 #The Secret Flowers 6.16
8 *Fish Market, Garrucha 0.54
9 **Shepherd's Delight 0.58
10 #Leda at the Lake 2.44
11 *Common Prayer 4.16
12 *Hay-on-Wye 0.52
13 *The Looking Glass 5.14
14 **Icarus in a Rainstorm (Six Views) 1.25
15 *La Source 2.24
16 **Folding the Real 1.30
17 *Trumpeldor Beach 5.03
18 #from The Velvet Shutter 3.38
19 ##A Walk to the Paradise Garden 2.44
20 *Night Fugue 2.38
21 ##Lens 0.51
22 *In Carinthia 3.56
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