Some of Us Just Fall

Polly Atkin is a multi-award-winning poet, essayist, nature writer and academic in the UK. She has taught both English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of London, Strathclyde University, Lancaster University and University of Cumbria. Her doctoral research focused on Romantic legacies and literary geographies of the Lake District, northwest England, in collaboration with the Wordsworth Trust. In 2022 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She works as a freelancer from her home in Grasmere, in the English Lake District. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by Much With Body (Seren, 2021), a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation and Laurel Prize 2022 longlistee. She has also published three poetry chapbooks: bone song (Aussteiger, 2008), Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) and With Invisible Rain (New Walk: 2018). Her biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), is the first to focus on Dorothy's later life and illness. Her work is included in anthologies of nature writing, ecopoetry and walking literature, including the UK's first anthology of nature writing by disabled and chronically ill writers, Moving Mountains (Footnote, 2023).