bio

Holly Corfield Carr is a poet, writer and researcher.

She is a Lecturer in Poetry at the University of East Anglia where she teaches on the MA Creative Writing (Poetry) and a Bye Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Her research explores site-specific writing practices, with a particular interest in caves and, more recently, shells.

She also makes poems, books and performances for specific sites, including a bike path, the Hayward Gallery, an orchard, an eighteenth-century crystal grotto and a passenger ferry called Matilda.

Her writing has received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2012 and won the Frieze Writer’s Prize in 2015. Recent poems have been published in Poetry, The Poetry Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry and The Happy Hypocrite.

She has read her work on BBC Radio 4 and at the Royal Albert Hall for BBC Radio 3 and worked as held residencies and fellowships at the Henry Moore Institute, the Wordsworth Trust, Spike Island and the National Trust who published two illustrated poetry books, Subsong and Indifferent Cresses—one for a headland, one for a woodland—in 2018.

Holly also teaches for Arvon, the Poetry School and has led writing workshops for Bristol Zoo, Royal West of England Academy, the British Ceramics Biennial and with young writers in schools and libraries across the UK. 

She received development and training as part of the Jerwood / Arvon Mentoring Scheme 2014/15 and has received additional support from Faber New Poets and Arts Council England.