Elected: 2025
Gillian Allnutt has published ten poetry collections, all but two with Bloodaxe Books. The latest, lode, came out in May 2025.
How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007) includes work from Nantucket and the Angel (1997) and Lintel (2001), both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
She has taught creative writing in universities, schools and for organisations such as The Arvon Foundation. She has held residencies in community-based projects – working, for example, with Orthodox Jewish women in Gateshead and, with Freedom From Torture in 2009-10, with asylum-seekers in Newcastle and Stockton.
She has also worked as a journalist and from 1983-88 was Poetry Editor of City Limits magazine in London.
She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award 2005 and received The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2016.
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.
