New fellow

The award-winning poet, who is Professor of Creative Writing in Newcastle University’s School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, is one of 29 new Fellows.

“I’m thrilled and honoured to be elected to the Royal Society of Literature,” said Professor Polley. “It came as a complete and wonderful surprise.”

Professor Polley will sign his name in the RSL Roll Book, which dates back to 1825 and features the signatures of Fellows and Honorary Fellows elected in the past 200 years.

RSL Fellows are some of the best writers working today and are nominated by their peers and selected by the Society’s governing board.

Acclaimed

Professor Polley is the author of five acclaimed books of poems and won the coveted 2016 TS Eliot Prize for poetry for his collection, Jackself.  His novel Talk of the Town won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2010. Published in 2023, his latest book of poems, Material Properties, was described in the TLS as ‘a kind of secular nature gospel [that] reconstructs fragile human and non-human stories through embedded text and wordplay’.

He joins Professor Preti Taneja and Professor Sinéad Morrissey as an RSL Fellow, while Emerita Professor Linda Anderson is an Honorary Fellow.