Oz Hardwick

Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies, and who has been described as a "major proponent of the neo-surreal prose poem in Britain."He has published "about a dozen" full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and most recently A Census of Preconceptions (Dublin:...See more

Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies, and who has been described as a "major proponent of the neo-surreal prose poem in Britain."He has published "about a dozen" full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and most recently A Census of Preconceptions (Dublin: SurVision Books, 2022). A keen collaborator, Oz is always working with artists in diverse media, including musicians, painters, photographers, and other writers. This has resulted in exhibitions, mixed-media performances, recordings, and publications. The latter include the 2021 Hedgehog chapbook The Still and Fleeting Fire with Amina Alyal.Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University, and has published extensively on Creative Writing. He has also edited or co-edited several anthologies, including The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) with Anne Caldwell, with whom he also co-edited Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022). The anthology Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Manoeuvres, co-edited with Cassandra Atherton, will be published by MadHat Press (Cheshire, MA) in 2024.Described as "exhaustingly prolific", as a photographer, Oz has had work on many rock album covers; as a musician, he has played at the Glastonbury Festival as the Summer Solstice sun rose; and as an academic he has published extensively on medieval art and literature, and on Creative Writing: however, he wishes it to be known that not one item on this list is as impressive as it sounds. In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for "a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry" but, at time of writing, is not dead yet. See less