Elected: 2019
Year of birth: 1948
Image credit: Freddie Claire
Denise Riley lives in London. Her prose books include War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983), ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988), The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005), Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012; revised edition 2019) and A Chorus of Ears: On the ‘Voice of the Poem’, 2026. Her poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair; 1996), Selected Poems (2000, revised 2019), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 (with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine; 2017) and Lurex (2022).
Fellows are nominated by peers and elected by our Council of writers – our governing Board. Being elected a Fellow of the RSL is a lifetime honour. This role gives them the opportunity to support other writers, readers and the future of literature. The RSL connects writers in the Fellowship to one another, and to a wider readership.
