Kit Wright

b. 1944

Kit Wright was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.

Poet and children’s author Kit Wright was born in 1944 and educated at Oxford University.

He lectured in Canada, before working as Education Officer at the Poetry Society in London (1970-75) and was Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University (1977-9). He was awarded an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1985.

His books of poetry include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and Short Afternoons (1989), which won the Hawthornden Prize and was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (2000).

Recent books of poetry include The Magic Box: Poems for Children (2009) and Ode to Didcot Power Station (2014).