Paul Farley

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool, England, in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. 

Farley’s first poetry collection, The Boy from the Chemist Is Here to See You (Pan Books, 1998), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection and a Somerset Maugham Award. He has authored seven other poetry collections: When It Rained for a Million Years (Picador, 2025), short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize; The Mizzy (Picador, 2019); The Dark Film (Picador, 2012); The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2010); Tramp in Flames (Picador, 2006); and The Ice Age (Picador, 2002), winner of the 2002 Whitbread Poetry Prize.

With Michael Symmons Roberts, he coauthored the prose work Death of the Poets (Vintage, 2018). 

Farley is the recipient of the Geoffrey Dearmer Memorial Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. He currently teaches creative writing at Lancaster University and lives in North Lancashire, England.