Poets

Julia Copus was born in London, and is a British poet and children's writer. Copus' books of poetry include The Shuttered Eye (Bloodaxe, 1995), which won her an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, In Defence of Adultery (Bloodaxe, 2003) and The World's Two Smallest Humans (Faber, 2012), shortlisted for both the Costa Book Awards (poetry category) and the T.S. Eliot Prize.[1] All three collections are Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She is known for establishing a new form in English poetry, which she has called the specular form, in which the second half of the poem mirrors the first, using precisely the same lines but in reverse order and differently punctuated. Eenie Meenie Macka Racka (an original 45-minute play for radio) was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September, 2003, having been commissioned after Copus won the BBC's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for Best New Radio Playwright in 2002. In the same year she won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition with 'Breaking the Rule'. In 2001, she received writing awards from the Arts Council of England and the Authors’ Foundation, and in 2003, she collaborated with sculptor Stephen Broadbent to produce a poem inscribed on a bronze bench and sculpture in Fleming Square, Blackburn. Copus was awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the University of Exeter in 2005, 2006 and 2007. The following year she was made an RLF Advisory Fellow and awarded an Honora..