Graft Poetry Authors

Andrew Boobier

Andrew was born in Haworth, West Yorkshire in 1963, home of the Bronte sisters and just over the moors from Ted Hughes' birthplace. He attended York University and gained a first class degree in English where he also won the Ursula Wadey Memorial prize for his translation of Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil.

After spending a number of years on an aborted PhD on Seamus Heaney, he got down to writing his own poetry rather than writing about others, and has published poetry and translations in the UK & USA in magazines such as Pennine Platform, Aesthetica, nthposition, The New Yorick, versus, The Rue Bella, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Pedestal Magazine, Poems Niederngasse, Eclectica, The Drunken Boat, Verse Libre Quarterly, Spume, and Snakeskin. He was nominated in 2003 for a Pushcart Prize.

He is the former editor of the Alsop Review's prestigious online quarterly magazine, Octavo, and is co-founder and Creative Director of his own web design and branding agency.

His debut collection, Reader, help me is published by Graft Poetry in April 2006.

Julia Deakin

Julia, a winner of this year's Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, was born in Nuneaton and has worked her way slowly north via Shropshire, the Potteries and Manchester to York where she went to university, learned to make toasted sandwiches and to love God's own county. After a year in France au pairing, six teaching 11-18s and a fling with 80s advertising, she became a freelance writer and has not really looked back more than five or six times a day.

Her articles and reviews have appeared in Mslexia, The Observer and The Times Educational Supplement and more recently as a poet in numerous magazines including Stand, The Rialto and The North. She lives on a moor in West Yorkshire from which she can just about see some of her mentors - Simon Armitage, Ian McMillan and, on a clear day, Les Murray.

Without a dog, published by Graft Poetry in March 2008, is Julia's first full collection.