Gillian Allnutt

Standard Name: Allnutt, Gillian
Birth Name: Gillian Marguerite Allnutt
Recognized as one of the most original and thought-provoking poets writing in the North-East of England, Gillian Allnutt has published ten collections of poetry to date. With a writing career spanning nearly four decades, the topics of her poems vary from family history to feminism to the bible, but invariably reflect an unyielding commitment to social justice. In 1988 she co-edited an anthology of contemporary British poetry. Over the years, her poems have been published in literary journals and notable poetry anthologies, such as Granta and the Best British Poetry series.
Gillian Allnutt is presented with the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, 21 February 2017.
Colour photograph of Gillian Allnutt in her later years, leaning over a table writing on a sheet of paper, and slightly smiling. She wears a grey shirt and her long white hair hangs in a single plait.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Fictionalization Elizabeth Siddal
In 1985 Gillian Allnutt sought to recreate Siddal's voice in a modern idiom in a slim poetry volume of her own entitled Lizzie Siddall: Her Journal. Recently, ES 's poetry has been increasing anthologized...
Fictionalization Sojourner Truth
Tillie Olsen in 1978 named ST as one of the mosts eloquent users of spoken works in her time.
Olsen, Tillie. Silences. Virago, 1980.
184
During the 1990s and early twenty-first century a series of important new studies of ST
Friends, Associates Alison Fell
On her trip to the USA in 1995 she met fellow-novelist Alison Lurie . A couple of years later she went on one foreign trip with novelist A. L. Kennedy and another with poet Judith Kazantzis
Literary responses Alice Munro
In England, Gillian Allnutt admired the way Munro confers poetic power on matter-of-fact, almost laconic writing, and Nina Bawden (whose name Munro's biographer mangles) her wise and perceptive acceptance of life.
Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro. McClelland and Stewart, 2005.
397
In the...

Timeline

15 April 1945
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by British soldiers (one of whom later became the father of the poet Gillian Allnutt ). Buchenwald too was liberated, by Americans.
20 June to 7 July 2016
British poets Carol Ann Duffy , Gillian Clarke , Imtiaz Dharker , and Jackie Kay , and musician John Sampson , went on a Shore to Shore Nationwide Poetry Tour .