Greta Stoddart: Alive Alive O

Greta Stoddart was born in Oxfordshire. She grew up in Belgium and Oxford before going on to study drama at Manchester University, then at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She co-founded the theatre company Brouhaha in London, touring the UK and Europe. She has lived in Devon since 2007.

Her first collection, At Home in the Dark (Anvil Press Poetry, 2001), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2001 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second, Salvation Jane (Anvil Press Poetry, 2008), was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Poetry Award. In 2007 she was nominated by Mslexia as one of the best ten contemporary women poets in the UK. Her poem ‘Deep Sea Diver’ was shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and later included in her third collection, Alive Alive O (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize. Her half-hour radio drama Who's There?, first broadcast on Radio 4's The Echo Chamber in 2017, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Her fourth collection, Fool, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022. In 2023 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a prize which recognises a poet's body of work.

Jesse Adlam filmed her at her home in Devon in June 2023 reading selections of poems from her two Bloodaxe collections, Alive Alive O and Fool. In this film she reads seven poems from Alive Alive O: ‘The Curtain’, ‘Lifeguard’, ‘Lamb’, ‘And here you are’, ‘Deep Sea Diver’, and ‘Turning Earth’. His film of her reading from Fool can be seen on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/844244454 Both films include music by Frank Adlam.