A freelance writer ever since he won the Gregory Award in 1974, Roger Garfitt has been Poetry Critic of the London Magazine, Editor of Poetry Review, Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Swansea University. He was married to Frances Horovitz, whose Collected Poems he edited after her early death from cancer. He made another life in Colombia, reporting for Granta and the London Review of Books. Now remarried, he lives in the Shropshire Hills, just under the Clee-Clun Ridgeway, the site of 'The Misgiving', a poem in PN Review that touches on the darkening world situation.
'Rites of Passage', his long poem in honour of the poet Tony Conran, was published in Building Jerusalem: Elegies on Parish Churches (Bloomsbury, 2016). In All My Holy Mountain, his Celebration in Poetry & Jazz of the life and work of Mary Webb, recorded with the John Williams Octet and the composer, Nikki Iles, on piano, came out in 2017 as the first CD from a new label, Re-stringing the Lyre, set up to champion the ancient partnership between poetry and music. It was widely welcomed in the jazz press for reviving the practice of Poetry & Jazz, with John Fordham hailing it in The Guardian as "an illuminating and imaginative addition to the genre". Border Songs, his history of the Marches in twelve short lyrics, is etched into the glass of the Shropshire Archives in Shrewsbury. A performing version with Sue Harris on the hammered dulcimer was first heard on BBC Radio 4's Kaleidoscope and presented in the Drama Studio at UEA, together with From the Ridge, a Latin-American sequence commissioned by the Poetry Society under their Poetry Places scheme and now archived on the Poetry Society website. Another performing version of both sequences was presented for the Friends of Madingley Hall with Gareth Rees-Roberts on guitar. Border Songs, From the Ridge and In All My Holy Mountain can all be found in Roger Garfitt's Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2000), together with his despatches from Bogotá during the Drug War and his account of a charged return to the North East of England and the places on Hadrian's Wall he had shared with Frances Horovitz. His memoir, The Horseman's Word, hailed by John Burnside in The Guardian as "a superb achievement", was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011 and shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley Prize. It is now available as a Vintage paperback. His latest poetry collection, The Action, is dedicated to his wife, Margaret, and is scheduled to be published by Carcanet in 2019.
The Poetry Masterclass has been running since 1993. It meets once a year and runs all year as an online workshop. Members of the Masterclass have published full-length collections, brought out pamphlets with the Poetry Business and Flarestack, appeared in such well-regarded anthologies as the Oxford Poets series from Carcanet and Reactions from UEA, won the TLS Poetry Competition and featured among the prizewinners in the competitions run by Second Light. Close reading and discussion of modern and contemporary poets in the seminars leads to two writing assignments which can be completed with guidance from the tutor and are then submitted for a friendly and supportive discussion in the group workshops. There is often a third, optional assignment to be completed in the students' own time and posted on the online workshop, which also features an Open Forum where students can post poems at any time, and an Editorial Suite where poems are assessed against national publishing standards.