The English poet grew up in Hampshire and now lives in London and on the Isle of Oxney.
The Long Beds, her second collection, was published in July 2020 and is to be launched in September 2020.
Her first collection The Observances, published by Carcanet/Oxford Poets, was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Book Award for Poetry, the Michael Murphy Poetry prize and won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Collection, which was awarded to Kate on 30 June 2016 in Belfast. She visited New York University in November 2016 to meet the Irish-American patrons of the prize and to read at the Tom Quinlan Lecture and Irish Arts Centre Poetry Fest.
Kate completed her PhD in 2012 while teaching Poetry in the English and Comparative Literature department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She gives workshops, close reading prompts and feedback to Poetry classes at Poetry School, Poets’ House Oxford and to schools.
Awarded the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Prize in 2008 she has received a number of other awards and was selected by Roddy Lumsden for Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt) and again in 2013 and for the 2015 anthology, the Forward Book of Poetry.
For some years Kate co-hosted readings and events with members of the Southwark Stanza of the Poetry Society and is a member of the 12 strong ensemble which performs the collage-poem Impossible House and the 2017 commissioned piece, Waterloo Sunrise, for the Waterloo Festival.
She accepts invitations to read her work alongside other writers and musicians and has appeared at the inaugural Open Weekend for The Guardian in 2012, Winchester and Aldeburgh Poetry Festival weekends, Poetry on the Lake at Lake Orta in Italy, and locally for Dulwich Festival events and at Bell House, Dulwich, the Carnegie Library, and independent bookshops. She was guest poet – with Kathleen Jamie – at Toppings Booksellers in Bath, the Shuffle at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden, Talking Rhythm in Greenwich and at the Bell Library in Provence. Her poems have recently been seen in Poetry Ireland Review, Shearsman, Southword, Stand (vol 18.2) and the TLS. In October 2019 for the TLS podcast, she recorded a poem from a Turkish hotel bed appropriately about a bed, and in April 2020, also from bed, in the small hours, during lockdown, began her first audio-video collage in collaboration with the artist Jack Trewin. This led to a second collaboration in June which will be premiered by Carcanet on 23 Sept 2020.