Fran Lock

Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, and the author of seven poetry collections: ‘Flatrock’ (Little Episodes, 2011), ‘The Mystic and the Pig Thief’ (Salt, 2014), ‘Dogtooth’ (Out Spoken Press, 2017), and a trilogy of works in collaboration with collage artist Steev Burgess for Culture Matters, ‘Muses and Bruises’ (2017), ‘Ruses and Fuses’ (2018), and ‘Raptures and Captures’ (2019). Her latest collection, ‘Contains Mild Peril’ was launched in November 2019 through Out Spoken Press. It was the Telegraph’s Poetry Book of the Month for November.

Fran’s work is widely published, featuring most recently in Chicago Review, Morning Star, POETRY, and The Stinging Fly. As well as in the much feted Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen. Selections of her poems have also appeared in the following anthologies: ‘Laudanum Chapbook Anthology: Volume Two’ (Laudanum, 2017), ‘Co-Incidental 1’ (Black Light Engine Room Press, 2018), and ‘Triptych’, (Poetry Bus, 2019).

Fran is the winner of numerous prizes, including the 2014 Ambit Poetry Prize, the 2015 Out Spoken Poetry Prize, the 2016 W.B Yeats Poetry Prize, and the 2018 Bread and Roses Award. She has placed in the National Poetry Competition consecutively three times in a row, most noteably with Last Exit to Luton in 2014.

Fran has recently submitted her practice-based Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London, titled, ‘Impossible Telling and the Epistolary Form: Contemporary Poetry, Mourning and Trauma’. She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters where she is currently working with poet and artist Jane Burn to put together an anthology of working-class women’s poetry.