Ode to Didcot Power Station

Kit Wright was born in 1944 in Crockham Hill, Kent, and has published widely for adults and children. After a scholarship to Oxford, he worked as a lecturer in Canada, was education officer at the Poetry Society from 1970 to 1975, Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1977-79, and subsequently a freelance writer. His poetry titles include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (Salamander, 1977), Bump-Starting the Hearse (Hutchinson, 1983), Poems 1974-1983 (Hutchinson, 1988), Short Afternoons (Hutchinson, 1989), Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000, including a new collection (Leviathan, 2000; Faber, 2008), Ode to Didcot Power Station (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) and Jug Band Jag (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). A selection of his poems was included in Penguin Modern Poets 1 (second series, 1995). He has won many literary awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, Hawthornden Prize, Heinemann Award and Cholmondeley Award.

'Sublime - Kit Wright, one of the best poets writing in Britain today' - Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian. 'As a poet he simply has more bounce per ounce' - Patricia Beer, TLS. 'Funny and profoundly human' - Christina Patterson, Sunday Times. 'His poetry is profoundly English in its combining of jaunty rhythms, comic rhymes - with subject-matter that is frequently bleak, blackly funny, and grimly personal. Bereavement, breakdown, failure (particularly in love), the "tears and terrors" or the quiet desperation beneath the surfaces of ordinary English life, a recurring note of grief or sympathy for victims and underdogs - and a persistent strain of remote and self-reproach - these are fairly constant in Wright's work, but so are the metrical ingenuity, the levity, and verbal panache' - Alan Jenkins, Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. 'He has formal virtuosity which is often comic; rumbustious, ribald, benign. But through all this work there is that poignancy, darkness, brush with despair which makes great comic work' - Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday. 'Masterly yet modest' - Sean O'Brien, TLS.