List Of Writers

FORD, RODERICK

Born in Swansea, Roderick has travelled widely. He lived and worked in West Africa and the Persian Gulf in the 1970s. Returning to the UK, he lived in Bristol through much of the 1980s. In the early 1990s he began writing and studying poetry seriously and by 1994 had decided to devote his life to it and signalled this commitment by moving to Paris. In October that year he was able to join the innovative workshop that had just been formed at the British Institute by British poet Douglas Oliver and American poet Alice Notely. Thereafter he spent long periods of time away from Paris, in Amsterdam, Venice, Stockholm and Svartsö – a wooded island in the Baltic. These engagements with different cultures informed and deepened his poetry, allowing him always to return to Paris with fresh ideas.

Roderick’s antecedents were Welsh, Irish and English and visiting Ireland for the first time in 1999, he decided to make his home there. In the year 2000 he was invited to join the Stephen’s Green workshop in Dublin, chaired by Sheila O’Hagan, and was invited to take part in Poetry Ireland’s Introductions readings. To date he has had approximately fifty poems published in magazines in Ireland, the UK, continental Europe and the USA. He won the Listowel poetry collection prize in 2004 and the Listowel single poem prize in 2005. The Shoreline of Falling, published by Bradshaw Books in 2005, is his first collection of poetry.

Selected Publications:
The Shoreline of Falling (Bradshaw Books, 2005)