About

Andrew Forster is a poet and literature development worker. Originally from South Yorkshire he lived in Scotland for 20 years before moving to Cumbria in 2008. He worked in social care for 14 years, latterly managing housing projects for adults with learning disabilities,before making literature the focus of his career from 1998.

His poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies since 1993, including The Rialto, Acumen, Obsessed with Pipework, Cencrastus, Lines Review, Envoi and Poetry Nottingham, among others. Essays and reviews of poetry have appeared in The Dark Horse, Fife Lines and Lines Review, Other Poetry and The North. He was awarded Scottish Arts Council writer's bursaries in 1998 and 2002. Dress Rehearsals, a sequence of poems based on the life of Lytton Strachey, was published as a pamphlet by Flarestack in 2000. In 2003 the poem Radnoti's Notebook was commended in the Bridport Prize. In 2008 he completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, passing with distinction and winning the Michael Schmidt Prize for the Outstanding Portfolio.

His first full-length collection, Fear of Thunder was published by Flambard Press in October 2007. This was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2008, and two poems from it Horse Whisperer and Brothers, are included in the new AQA GCSE syllabus. A second collection Territory, focusing on place and our relationship with it, and based mainly in the remote village of Leadhills in South West Scotland, was published in 2010. Later in 2010, Digging, a collaboration with the artist and printmaker Hugh Bryden, was published by Roncadora Press. It consists of ten new poems with accompanying drawings by Hugh Bryden.