Meet Sarah
Sarah is a poet, editor, and creative writing tutor.
She grew up in north Devon, on the edge of Exmoor, and is particularly interested in writing about and through the natural world.
Her debut pamphlet Inklings was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She has published two collections with Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press - Slant Light, (2016) and Bloom, (2021) and is working on her third. A hybrid pamphlet, Pond, was published by The Braag Press in Spring 2024 and a hand-stitched limited edition pamphlet, Almanac, will be published by Coast to Coast to Coast in 2025.
Sarah’s poems have appeared in magazines including Poetry Review, The Rialto, Magma and Poetry London, on beermats, billboards and the side of buses, and in anthologies including Best British Poetry, The Forward Book of Poetry and Staying Human (Bloodaxe). Awards include a Society of Authors’ Foundation Award and first prizes in the London Magazine poetry competition, the Poets & Players competition and the Manchester Cathedral poetry competition. She was writer-in-residence at Phytology, Bethnal Green nature reserve.
She holds a post-graduate certificate in teaching creative writing from the University of Cambridge and is researching an AHRC-funded PhD in inter-species poetry at the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick.
Sarah Westcott is too good a poet to simply charm us, and the work here is fierce with intelligence, compassion and the sheer exuberance of attending to what Hopkins called ‘the dearest freshness deep down things.’
— Jacob Polley