Julia Copus


Julia Copus FRSL is a British poet, biographer and children's writer.
Copus was born in London and grew up with three brothers, two of whom went on to become musicians. She attended The Mountbatten School, a comprehensive in Romsey, and Peter Symonds Sixth Form College in Winchester. She went on to study Latin at St Mary's College, Durham.
Copus' books of poetry include The Shuttered Eye, which won her an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the pamphlet Walking in the Shadows, which won the Poetry Business competition, In Defence of Adultery, The World's Two Smallest Humans, shortlisted for both the Costa Book Award for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Girlhood, winner of the inaugural . She is known for establishing a new form in English poetry, which she has called the specular form, in which the second half of the poem mirrors the first, using the same lines but in reverse order and differently punctuated.
Eenie Meenie Macka Racka was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September, 2003, having been commissioned after Copus won the BBC's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for Best New Radio Playwright in 2002. In the same year, she won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition with Breaking the Rule.
Copus was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and the following year was made an RLF Advisory Fellow and awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Exeter. In 2010, she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for An Easy Passage, and in 2020 her collection Girlhood was awarded the inaugural for best collection by a non-US citizen. She has served on the judging panel for a number of literary prizes, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Costa Book Award, the UK's National Poetry Competition, the Encore Award for best second novel, the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry and the for 16-18 year olds, run by Christ Church, Oxford.
Copus has also written four picture books: Hog in the Fog, The Hog, The Shrew and the Hullabaloo , The Shrew that Flew and My Bed is an Air Balloon ''.''

Personal life

She lives in Blackheath, London, with her husband, Andrew Stevenson.

Publications

Poetry collections

The Shuttered Eye, Bloodaxe Books 1995. In Defence of Adultery, Bloodaxe Books 2003. The World's Two Smallest Humans, Faber 2012. Girlhood, Faber 2019.

For children

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As editor


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Non-fiction

, Faber 2021

For radio

Eenie Meenie Macka Racka, afternoon play, BBC Radio 4, September 2003The Enormous Radio, afternoon play, BBC Radio 4, July 2008Ghost Lines, a sequence of poems for radio, BBC Radio 3, December 2011, on the life and work of Charlotte Mew, BBC Radio 4, November 2019

Audio

Awards and Fellowships