Authors profile
 |
Bert Ward (May Gill) Bert Ward was born in North Ormesby Middlesbrough in 1922 and lived on the Grove Hill council estate from age seven. He joined the Royal Navy aged 15 and left in 1946 having had a variety of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. In 1956 he left the railways where he was a goods guard to work as a rigger at ICI Wilton and attended WEA classes. In 1957 he went to Ruskin College, Oxford, on a trade union scholarship, then worked for the AEU in London. For research into the British apprenticeship system he was awarded a mature state scholarship and studied economics and politics at the LSE. He started writing poetry and short stories when working as a senior lecturer. When he retired to Middlesbrough, he attended Andy Croft’s and Heather Bennett’s Creative Writing classes. Mudfog published some of his short stories, notably Dear Bob 1931 and 1932. He has since published Dear Bob 1933 himself and has just completed and published a brief political autobiography, Who’ll Take The Collection? Both these titles are available from Mudfog Press by post (see contact information), but not from INP. |
 |
John Harrison Born 1950 and raised in Leeds, John Harrison has lived for over twenty years in the village of Skelton, near Saltburn. 2001 saw the publication by Mudfog of his Not The Last Bus Back from Loftus, a first collection of poems. Latterly, like his alter ego in the poems, he has been working as a security guard at Boulby Potash Mine. This followed a winter without a job. The poems draw on these experiences, as they do on a previous spell as a hospital worker, on being made redundant and on the author’s Buddhism. |
 |
Shirley Hetherington Shirley Hetherington was born in Middlesbrough and lives in Great Ayton. She began adult life as a junior school teacher. When bringing up her own children, she began to train as a painter and potter. Her lifetime love of language made it a natural progression to create with words, as well as with paint and clay. Her poetry began in the stimulation and encouragement of the University of Leeds Creative Writing courses at Harrow Road in Middlesbrough, which she attended until the Centre was closed down. She is a founder member of Hall Garth Poets and continues to draw inspiration and support from her fellow writers. Her first pamphlet, Shiny Days, was published by Mudfog in 1997. Women's problems and expectations have been explored in her recent exhibition of ceramic sculptures at the Dorman Museum, Middlesbrough. |
 |
Andy Croft Andy Croft lives in Middlesbrough. Among his books are Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, A Weapon in the Struggle, Comrade Heart, Holme and Away and thirty-seven books for teenagers, mostly about football. His books of poetry include Nowhere Special, Gaps Between Hills (with Mark Robinson), Headland, Just as Blue, Great North and Comrade Laughter. He has edited four anthologies of poetry, Speaking English, Red Sky at Night (with Adrian Mitchell), North by North East (with Cynthia Fuller) and Not Just a Game (with Sue Dymoke). He writes a monthly poetry column in the Morning Star and runs Smokestack Books. |
 |
Sheila Nichols Sheila Nichols is an Aberdonian who emigrated to England on marriage, settled in the Cleveland area in 1958, working as a civil servant. After retirement she attended creative writing classes at the Harrow Road Centre of Leeds University School of Continuing Education in Middlesbrough. She served on the Board of The Tees Valley Writer for several years. In 1997 her first poetry pamphlet, Nice Words, was published by Mudfog Press. Many of her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio Cleveland. She now lives in Hartlepool, where her four children and their partners visit, along with seven grandchildren, fortunately not all at once. She enjoys being part of writing groups for the pleasure of hearing other work and the opportunity to improve her own. |
 |
Keith Porritt Keith Porritt was born in 1935, a Yorkshireman whose family had lived over many generations in the area around Staithes. He left school aged 14 and worked as a messenger boy at ICI before being selected as an apprentice electrician at the Cargo Fleet Steel and Iron Company in Middlesbrough and attending classes at the Hugh Bell Evening Institute and Constantine Technical College. At 20 he decided to follow the family tradition and join the Merchant Navy, but failed his medical and never realised that dream. He then left the North East to work for British Thompson Houston in their design office in Reading as a junior draughtsman. He worked on systems for conventional power stations and for the first generation of nuclear power stations. He later moved to A. V. Roe and Co. in Manchester, still working as a draughtsman on aircraft and missile designs. Health and other issues prompted a move in 1964 for Keith and Anne and their two young daughters back to their family and Teesside, where he got work in the design office of South Durham Steel and Iron Company at their Malleable Works and was eventually promoted to posts as Chief Draughtsman and Senior Industrial Engineer. During that period he studied with the Open University and gained his degree in Science and Technology. In 1981, disillusioned by changes being made to the industry by Mrs Thatcher and Mr McGregor, he resigned and took a one year post-graduate teacher training course at St. John’s College, York. He taught at Egglescliffe School where he became Head of Craft, Design and Technology before ill health forced his retirement in 1992. Since then he has been a keen adult education student, taking classes in creative writing, history, computing, wood craft and metal craft. He is one of the founder members of Hall Garth Poets and is continuing to explore in his work his experiences in the steel industry and his love of the countryside and of long-distance walks. One long poem in preparation, Summit Ridges and Sea Cliffs, is a celebration of the Cleveland Way. |
 |
Syndou Diarrassouba Syndou Diarrassouba came from Liberia three years ago to seek asylum in the UK. In Middlesbrough he has learnt to read and write and is studying car mechanics at Middlesbrough College, where he was named as Student Learner of the Year last year and is now taking the exams for his Level 3 Mechanical Engineering. In October 2005 the Home Office ruled that, since he has made such good progress in the UK, there is no reason for him not to return to Liberia. He says that if he returns he will die and he believes this profoundly. Liberia is in a chaotic state with little or no access to education and health care; Syndou’s home area has been destroyed by years of civil war and his immediate family are all dead. This is a talented poet, a new and remarkable voice in the Tees Valley, a person who has ‘crossed the horizon between hopelessness and hope’, yet now lives under this heartless and unthinking judgement. How cruel if we have helped him come so far only to break his spirit again. Mudfog Press joins the many individuals and organisations in Middlesbrough and the wider UK who are asking the Home Office to reconsider his case. |
 |
Gary Ming Gary Ming has been a bricklayer, a steel erector, a junkie and a convict. He started to work on his poems while in prison. A free man again, he is an enthusiastic writer, some of whose poems are published in the new anthology, The Wilds, from Ek Zuban autumn 2007. Gary is now a member of the Mudfog editorial board. |
 |
Norman Cowell Image and Info to come |
 |
Katharine Banner Katharine
began writing poetry after graduating from |
 |
Pat Borthwick Pat Borthwick was born in Lincoln and much of her upbringing was spent on the canals and waterways of Britain. She now lives in rural North Yorkshire. Pat first trained in visual art and worked for many years as a ceramic sculptor. She has been Writer in Residence for prisons, libraries, schools and hospitals as well as for a coal mine, a chalk cliff and a cabbage. On community projects Pat frequently collaborates with other artists. Her work has been widely published in magazines and she enjoys a national reputation for her sparkling readings. Roger Garfitt has described her as ‘a conjuror with real stars up her sleeve’ and Simon Armitage as ‘a mapmaker with whose maps you can surely find your way.’ Before Swim an earlier full length collection was Between Clouds and Caves (Littlewood Arc, 1990) and a third book is due out from Templar in October 2008. Pat won the 2007 Templar Poetry Pamphlet Competition and Wave will be published in the autumn of 2007. A former chair of NAWE, Pat is also a part-time tutor for the Open College of the Arts and runs the Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition. She was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2003. |
 |
Garry Newmarch Garry R. Newmarch is a Boro boy born in 1950. he is a graduate of the University of Teesside twice and Lyons University once. His work carfeer included ten years in the Civil Service and - in the early 70s - HM Customs Waterguard (Tees & Hartlepool). He enjoys performing his work and ad-libbing and once made the quarter-finals of 'Countdown'. Garry's best-known poem is 'The Moonlight on The Lake in Albert Park' which was broadcast on BBC Radio Cleveland and used in a film by Claire Montgomery of Tyne Tees TV. |
 |
Tara Bergin Tara Bergin was born in Dublin. Russian Conversations, a collection of short stories, was her first publication in 2005. In 2006 her story ‘The Italian is Not My Songbird’ was broadcast on Radio 4 as part of their Opening Lines series for new writers. Her articles have appeared in Northern Review and Acknowledged Land. Other publications include work in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Review and Poetry London. She is currently a research student at Newcastle University studying the poetry of the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva. Tara became a member of the Mudfog board of editors in 2006. |
 |
Geoff Tomlinson Geoff Tomlinson was born in Barnoldswick, West Yorkshire, and brought up in Burnley, Lancashire. His parents were cotton weavers, but the family had been dairy farmers, a tradition his brother Jack continued. He taught in Lancashire and Dorset before moving to County Durham as a lecturer. Casual work has included being a roller-carrier in a mill, a postman, milk roundsman, market gardener, farmhand, literature examiner and small press (Platform Poets) editor. Relics of these experiences may crop up anywhere in his poems, along with references to Art and Music. He has published poems and stories in a range of magazines and the dichotomies between town and country and between academia and a working-class upbringing are evident in much of his work. One of his stories is in the Mudfog 'Discoverers' anthology. |
 |
Andy Willoughby Andy Willoughby is a poet and
playwright from Middlesbrough, he is a |
 |
Geoff Strange Geoff Strange was born and educated in the West
Country and Wales. A subsequent career
in secondary and higher education took him to the home counties, midlands and
north west before he finally settled in the North East. He started to write
poetry seriously on retirement and joined a Leeds University creative writing
class at Harrow Road Centre in Middlesbrough. He has published poems in various
local and national anthologies. He won the North York Moors National Park's
open poetry prize in 2002 and joined the editorial board of Mudfog in 2006. Much of his poetry is inspired by the history and
natural beauty of the northern landscapes and regular travel abroad has
deepened his appreciation of how human beings affect and are affected by their
environment. |
 |
Jo Heather Jo Heather was born in South Africa, coming to England when still too young to have any exotic memories. Her parents, both from the West Country, returned to their roots and she grew up in Devon. She graduated from Leeds, where she read English, in 1966. After several years in London, where she worked in the East End and qualified in psychiatric social work, she came back north to Middlesbrough where she worked, for the most part, as an ASW attached to St. Luke’s Hospital. Since early retirement she has lived on the edge of the North York Moors with her husband, with whom she shares three children. They sometimes read her poetry, hoping it’s not about them. |
 |
Ian Horn Ian Horn was born in County Durham, where he still lives. He helps to run Colpitts Poetry and has performed his work widely, including at Glastonbury and on BBC and Danish TV as well as at several European festivals. In 2000 he won a Northern Promise Award from New Writing North, which enabled him to work with Andy Croft as his mentor and to publish in 2001 a Mudfog pamphlet, Jazz from the Collieries. He was the editor of Verses United, an anthology of football poetry which has inspired projects in many schools and at football festivals in the UK and abroad. He recently collaborated with Northern Sinfonia on a sound/text response to the music of Mozart. |
 |
Colette Bryce, Editor, Ink on Paper Colette Bryce is an established poet of national reputation who has been a recent Literary Fellow in the Universities of Durham and Newcastle. She led with poet Paul Batchelor the workshops which generated the poems in response to works of art in the mima collection and then acted as selector and editor for the collection, Ink on Paper. |
 |
Gareth Spark Gareth Spark was born in Whitby in 1979. He has lived his entire life there, apart from a year in Catalunya. He has four children. |
 |
Janice Sinson Janice Sinson was born and worked in Leeds. Initially trained as a sculptor, she retrained as a psychologist whilst bringing up her family and had a successful career as a research psychologist with many publications. Her monograph, John Keats and the Anatomy of Melancholy, was published in 1971 by the Keats-Shelley Society on the 150th. anniversary of Keats’ death. She retired to the North Yorkshire coast, living halfway up a cliff near the sea and for some unaccountable reason began to write poetry. |
 |
Khadim Hussain Khadim Hussain has lived in Middlesbrough since 1975. After a science-based education in the 1970s, he worked in ICI Wilton’s Research and Development Department. Other jobs have included running a printing business, managing a tandoori and being a machine technician. He became interested in writing, eventually attending Creative Writing courses at the University of Teesside, studying with Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby. He is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University, where he is developing his craft as a writer of poetry and plays. As well as his Ek Zuban book, Going for a Curry? A Social and Culinary History (2006), Khadim has had his poems published in a range of books, magazines and newspapers, including the Evening Gazette, Northern Echo, Muslim Weekly, Bradford Telegraph and Argus, Kenaz, Tadeeb, The Wilds (Ek Zuban, 2007) and Teesway One Nine Nine (Shutter Books, 2007). |
 |
Mike Pratt Mike Pratt is from East Cleveland and is married to a local teacher, Ratchel Wills. He works throughout the North of England on environmental and wildlife issues and is Chief Executive of the Northumberland Wildlife Trust. He is devoted to nature conservation and environmental management. He is also an Infinite Tai Chi teacher and leads workshops and chi walks, that combine experiencing the outdoors with Tai Chi and related holistic practices, aimed at re-connecting people to nature. |
 |
Natalie Boxall, Hilary Cooper, Mike Edwards, Liz G These five writers all worked during 2007 with Mudfog mentors to develop their craft. Natalie Boxall Natalie Boxall is from Middlesbrough and works as a broadcast journalist. She is also a regular contributor to The Guardian and Plan B magazine and enjoys playing roller derby for the Middlesbrough Milk Rollers, walking her greyhound and spending time in pubs, Middlesbrough Central Library, MIMA and Albert Park. She is working on getting her first novel published. It may take some time. Hilary Cooper I know plenty of people have said writing isn’t something you choose. I agree with them. It’s something that comes to me in the middle of the night, keeps me scribbling into the early hours. It’s an obsession, a way of keeping alive a part of myself which might otherwise have been lost. Meanwhile, my life has taken an odd, winding course. On the outside I have been teacher, wife, mother, and recently something unfathomable called a ‘Communications Manager’. But writing has remained – hidden, internal – a testament to the real, secret me. It is what keeps me alive and tender - a lifebuoy. Words have a mysterious power too, that can change not just the writer but also the reader. Like seeing an old friend across a crowded room, like a ship altering course to rescue a survivor, words used well have the power to change what happens next. Surely this is a kind of magic, with the power to breathe itself through locked doors and make fire in the snow. One day I hope to become an accomplished magician. Mike Edwards Michael Edwards recently completed an MA in creative writing at Northumbria University and is currently on an arts apprenticeship scheme through Tees Valley Arts. He performs regularly at spoken word events across the North East and has had work published in Fresh, Discoverers, The Wilds and Kenaz magazine. He is still trying to write a novel. Liz Geraghty Liz was born in Staithes and grew up in Middlesbrough where she lives with her daughter. Janis McBride Janis was born in Middlesbrough and lives there with her husband. She began writing plays about twenty years ago and won the ‘Kate Collingwood Award’ in 1995 for her play, Annie’s First Love. Her work, including The Tupperware™ Party, has been performed throughout the North East. Two Daft Lasses in a Boat and A Cat in the Road were also performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Janis has written extensively for school and community projects and has also written several short films. She recently worked with mentor Sara Maitland on a collection of short stories told from a child’s point of view. Pirates and Teddy Bears is part of that collection. |
 |
Monica Sharp Monica Sharp was born in Port Clarence, the youngest of eight sisters and one brother. Convent educated, she began her working life as a shorthand typist, with an interest in journalism. A 60's Biker, she met her husband when she was seventeen, and her writing career changed direction: she became and remained a lifelong diarist. She played national basketball, abseiled and canoed. When bringing up their four children, she qualified in Youth and Community Work, going on to become a Social Worker. She took up her writing again after her husband died in 1989, when she joined a WEA Creative Writing Class with Phoenix Poets, followed by the Leeds University Writing Courses. She is a founder member of Hall Garth Poets. Her short story, A Line in the Sand, was published by Dogeater Press in 2008. |