Tim Liardet was born in London in 1959 and was educated at the University of York. He has worked variously in the fields of cabinet-making, information technology and marketing, and lived for several years working solely as a freelance writer and critic. During this period he taught at the second-largest young offenders’ prison in Europe, drawing on this experience to write his prize-winning collection, The Blood Choir.
Currently Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, he has produced five collections of highly acclaimed poetry to date. His third collection, Competing with the Piano Tuner, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and was longlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1998. His fourth, To the God of Rain, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. Liardet was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2002.
A widely respected critic, he has written reviews for newspapers and journals including The Independent, The Guardian, Poetry Review and PN Review and was recently poet in residence at The Guardian. His fifth collection, The Blood Choir, won an Arts Council England Writer’s Award as a collection in progress in 2003, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2006 and was shortlisted for the 2006 TS Eliot Prize.
Liardet is a cineaste, and this can be keenly felt in his poems, which are filmic and forensic, sometimes visceral but – as one would come to expect from this accomplished formalist – always elegant. His sixth collection of poems, a book-length elegy for a dead brother, which explores the psychodrama of family and the possibilities of evolutionary psychology, is currently nearing completion.
Bibliography
The Blood Choir, Seren, Bridgend, 2006
The Uses of Pepper (pamphlet), Smith/Doorstop Books, Sheffield, 2003
To the God of Rain, Seren, Bridgend, 2003
Competing with the Piano Tuner, Seren, Bridgend, 1998
Fellini Beach, Seren, Bridgend, 1994
Clay Hill, Seren, Bridgend, 1988
Bibliography
Tim Liardet's homepage
Odd Raft & Seven Poems
Featured in Ars Interpres magazine, Tim writes about his experiences of working in the Young Offenders’ Prison, plus poems.
Tim Liardet's Workshop
From the Guardian Unlimited website.
