Rookie: Selected Poems

About Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her 2020 collection The Air Year won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection In These Days of Prohibition was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. As a playwright Bird has been shortlisted for the George Devine Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her theatre credits include: The Trojan Women (Gate Theatre 2012) The Trial of Dennis the Menace (Purcell Room 2012) Chamber Piece (Lyric Hammersmith 2013) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Northern Stage 2015) The Iphigenia Quartet (Gate Theatre 2016) and Red Ellen (Northern Stage Nottingham Playhouse Royal Lyceum Theatre and York Theatre Royal 2022). She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.