Rhiannon Hooson is an award-winning poet and creative mentor working in the Welsh Marches. She has performed at literature festivals across the UK and in Europe, and her work has been featured in the Guardian, Magma, and Poetry Wales among others. In the last few years, she has been a Literature Wales bursary recipient, writer in residence at the Hay Festival, winner of the First Chapter Award, and the judge of the PENfro festival poetry competition.

She has a PhD in poetry from the University of Lancaster, where she taught creative writing, and spent time living and working in Cumbria and Mongolia before settling in the Welsh marches. As well as writing, she also works as a creative mentor to poets at all stages of their career, and teaches online courses aimed at helping writers build a sustainable creative practice.

Her latest book, Goliat, was published by Seren Books.

About Goliat:

Goliat is the long-awaited follow-up to Hooson’s debut collection The Other City. The title poem takes us to the Barents Sea and the dark waters of a Russian oil field named Goliat – a whale, a giant, a monster – to the ‘singular infinities of the wintering sea’, where something is starting to sing.

Nature and climate crisis are forever present in the consciousness of these poems, as in ‘Doggerland’, a lament for the nearing extinction of the white fronted goose, or in ‘Horse Skull Crown’, a folk dance for the evening of the world.

The pinnacle of the collection is the sequence ‘Full Moon on Fish Street’ which introduces an invented artist, known only as Aubrey, and details the erotic dynamic between her and her muse Elizabeth Kidd, which unfolds across poems and against the vibrantly drawn backdrop of St Ives. Art and artists populate the pages of Goliat, as well as a deep sense of place and history, united in the the series ‘Dirtwife’, inspired by the long history of pigments and dyestuffs.

This intelligent, sensuous second collection tackles the precariousness of climate emergency and of existing in a human body, along with poems exploring the monstrous and the more-than-human, and the intimate histories of women and their work.

"“Hooson’s poetry is a rich and assured gift—one cannot but admire her craft." Menna Elfyn

She is also a painter, and as such her writing often betrays an interest in ekphrastics and interdisciplinary work. Her latest exhibition was Overlay, at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms.