Julia Copus is a poet and children’s author. She was born in London and now lives in Curry Mallet in Somerset. All three of her poetry collections are Recommendations of the Poetry Book Society, a body set up by T.S. Eliot in 1953 to select the best new poetry books published in each quarter.
She has won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition and the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Ghost Lines, a cycle of radio poems following the journey of a couple undergoing IVF treatment, was shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award, and her third collection, The World’s Two Smallest Humans, was nominated for both the T S Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award.
Julia is also an experienced judge and has sat on panels for the Costa, Geoffrey Faber, Ted Hughes, Encore and T. S. Eliot prizes, and for the National Poetry Competition. 2018 sees the publication of her fourth Faber picture book for children, My Bed is an Air Balloon. She is currently working on a new collection of poems and a biography of turn-of-the-century Bloomsbury poet, Charlotte Mew. In 2018 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
