Sue Hubbard

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and art critic. She has published five collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), Swimming to Albania (Salmon Poetry) and Radium Dreams (Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge) in collaboration with the artist Eileen Cooper RA that also formed a major exhibition.

Twice winner of the London Writers’ competition and twice a Hawthornden Fellow, she has won third prize in the National Poetry Competition and received two bursaries from Yaddo, upstate NY, and a major Arts Council Award. As the Poetry Society’s Public Art Poet, she was commissioned in 2000 by the Arts Council and the BFI to create London’s biggest art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo’s IMAX. This has now been carved in stone by the artist Gary Breeze and permanently installed in the crypt of St. John’s Church, Waterloo. During her Poetry Society residency she created a number of site-specific poems for Birmingham’s jewellery quarter and was writer-in-residence at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill during ArchiTEXT week in 2003. Her poems have been read on Radio 3, Radio 4  and RTE, and appeared in The Irish Times, The London Magazine and Acumen, as well as prestigious anthologies, including Carcanet’s Oxford Poets 2000. She has contributed to many arts programmes such as Kaleidoscope, Poetry Please, Night Waves and The Verb.

Her novels include: Depth of Field, (Dewi Lewis), Girl in White (Cinnamon and Pushkin Press), and the highly acclaimed Rainsongs, (Duckworth, Overlook Press US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China). Flatlands, her fourth novel, is due from Pushkin Press and Mercure de France in June 2023. Rothko’s Red, her collection of  short stories, was published by Salt.

She has run creative writing workshops at Tate, the V&A, The Royal Academy, The Royal College of Art, Middlesex University, Kings College, London, Birmingham University, The Architectural Association, The Bartlett School of Architecture and Roche Court Sculpture Park, The Royal College of Art, and Arvon, and taken part in many literary festivals including Cambridge, Ilkely, Kinsale (Ireland), Clifden (Ireland), Listowel Writers Week (Ireland), Port Elliot, Wells by the Sea, and The Dylan Thomas Centre. 

As an art critic she has written for Time Out, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The New Statesman and The London Magazine and is a senior writer for Artlyst. A collection of her art writings Adventures in Art was published by Damien Hirst’s Other Criteria.

Her pamphlet God's Little Artist, inspired by the work of painter Gwen John, is forthcoming in October 2023.