Dr Simon Smith

(BA, Kent; PhD, Glasgow)

Simon Smith is a poet, translator and essayist. He worked at The Poetry Library on the fifth floor of The Royal Festival Hall in London from 1991-2007, and was its Librarian from 2003 until 2007. He taught Creative Writing at London South Bank University where he devised and led the BA and MA, and at the Open University. He has taught at the University of Kent since 2006. 

Nine full-length collections have appeared: Fifteen Exits, Reverdy Road, Mercury, London Bridge, 11781 W. Sunset Boulevard, More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry: Selected Poems 1989-2012, Day In, Day Out, some Municipal Love Poems and The Books of Catullus. Mercury was long-listed for the Costa Prize in 2007; in 2009 he was a Hawthornden Writing Fellow; and was a judge of the National Poetry Competition in 2004. 

He has written reviews and essays on poetry for Poetry Review and PN Review, and his poems and translations by Baudelaire, Reverdy, Martial and Catullus have appeared in New Statesman, Poetry Review, PN Review and Stand. He has read his work to audiences in the UK, US, Canada and France. Since 2010 he has worked on collaborative poetry and music projects with Jamie Telford, David Herd, Sam Bailey, Jack Hues and The-Quartet, Matt Wright and Evan Parker. Broadcast in January 2020, Simon Smith took part in the Radio 4 programme 'In Our Time,' talking about Roman poet, Catullus.  

• Contemporary poetry: modernist, post-modernist;
  
• poetic journals: Paul Blackburn, Joanne Kyger; 
  
• translation: Catullus, Horace, Martial, Propertius, Baudelaire, Reverdy, Apollinaire, Rilke, Hölderlin; 
  
• translation and translation theory; 
  
• poetics. 

Projects supervised: Women’s poetry and elegy (received Faculty of Humanities Research Prize at the University of Kent); George Oppen and science.

Current Practice as Research PhD projects under supervision: Disability and Medical Humanities; Apocalyptical poetry and W S Graham; Poetries of Place: Charles Olson, David Jones, Laurie Duggan; German Poetry and Eco-Poetics; Performance, Concrete and Visual Poetry in the Gallery. 
Simon welcomes any proposals for similar Practice as Research PhD projects to those listed here, as well as, other topics, such as translation, prose poetry, poetics. 

Simon Smith has been external examiner at the universities of Bolton, Greenwich, Roehampton, UEL, Birkbeck, and externally examined MAs and PhDs at the universities of Bolton and Hertfordshire. He is a peer reviewer for NAWE.