Rebecca Bilkau

The poems in Rebecca Bilkau’s Weather Notes (Oversteps, 2012) were described by Graham Mort as “working at the edges of lives where history, mythology and death lie under the skin of experience to remind us human existence is also temporary and fragile”.

A far cry from her first – very very long – award winning poem, written when she was nine, where she imagined she was a bird. Thirty years later she won a scholarship to the Poets’ House in Ireland and reassessed her craft.

Manchester Cathedral’s International Interfaith Poet of the Year in 2004, she has won other prizes, including two Lancaster Litfest Competitions and is Poet in Residence for Initiative Magazine.  Latterly she co-founded Beautiful Dragons Collaborations, where anthologies are compiled by theme, on a first come, first write basis. My Dear Watson, in which each of the 118 chemical elements has its own poet, and therefore own poem, will be published in November 2015.

In 2011 she moved to Wolfenbüttel. Lower Saxony with her German husband. The mixed marriage inspired the 2014 Gruntvig Award winning Book of Plans Hopes and Dreams, an Anglo-German writing project linking World War One to the future. Upping sticks also inspired this collection.