I’m a poet and editor (and more recently a screenwriter) born in Poole, Dorset, and now based in Bulmer, a small village in North Yorkshire. I have published six poetry collections, most recently Amplitude (Recent Work Press, 2022), and a major study of the violinist Nigel Kennedy.
For many years, I was Director of NAWE (The National Association of Writers in Education). I was then based at the University of Canberra for 3 years, as director of Poetry on the Move, and am now an Adjunct Associate Professor there. I have my Canberra colleagues to thank for the recent flourishing of my writing, and many of the creative projects that continue to emerge.
I have always been interested in poetry presenting itself in unexpected ways, and there are glimpses on the various pages here of exhibitions and commissions that have enabled me to pursue that vision. Music and film are often in the mix. I benefited from an extensive musical education as a choral scholar at Winchester Cathedral, and music remains of vital importance to my professional and recreational life.
Awards: Ruskin Prize (2017); Ken Goulding Prize for Professional Excellence (Middlesex University, 2014); Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors (1987); Writer’s Bursary from Yorkshire Arts (1982).
Poetry prize judging: Poetry by Heart (2020); University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize (2019); University of Canberra Poetry and Health Prize (2017); University of Canberra Young Poets Awards (2015-17); Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets (2013).
Other roles: Royal Literary Fund Fellow, University of Leeds (2019-23); Poetry Editor, Westerly magazine; Creative Writing tutor/examiner, University of Leeds, University of Hull, Coventry University, University of East London, Harrogate College; Reader for Empyrean Films/Stanley Kubrick.
Comment/Reviews
On Asterisk: “The poems and photographs in this unique collection are numinous and sharp with surprise and pleasure. Paul Munden’s poems provide a way of re-seeing and re-shaping spaces; of re-imagining and revising the history and inhabitants of a place; and of playing with time, image and the music of language in styles that beguile and delight. I enjoyed this book immensely. It is a gift to any reader who values attentive, playful, wide-awake art.” – David Morley
On Analogue/Digital: “The analogue/digital divide has never been more beguiling than in this masterful collection of nuanced and subtle poems. In them we travel routes into new and old technologies, across continents and the world, exploring history, being and modernity. And the collection reminds us that language crosses all divisions, speaking eloquently and movingly about the vicissitudes of personal change and the power of lasting connections.” – Paul Hetherington
“[A] particularly strong suite of poems emerges, on the Australian natural world. The Great Barrier Reef, for example, is gorgeously figured as a ‘submerged cathedral’.” – Ben Kunkler
On Chromatic: “Munden’s vivid, well realised poems range across hemispheres and centuries, embracing music, art, film, historical events, and the potent catalysts of love, illness and death. In these pages our human frailties are apprehended with both a clear eye and a tender attentiveness.” – Judy Johnson
“‘The Bulmer Murder’ is an extraordinary achievement and would make an excellent text from which to teach across several disciplines.” – Anne Buchanan-Stuart
On Amplitude: “In his luminous and resonant new collection—poignant, witty, effortlessly inventive—Paul Munden explores a whole world of human experience through the lens of music. Like Proust’s madeleine, music opens up for him the amplitude of time and memory, from which he calls up places, occasions, lives mourned and celebrated, and a seemingly inexhaustible fund of cultural reference, its characters, real and imagined, ranged vividly before us.”—Stephen Edgar
“Accomplished, elegant and a delight to read. Intriguing and thoughtful, rigorous and heartfelt, I’ll be thinking about this beautiful book for a long time.”—Lisa Brockwell
Paul Munden 