Katie Byford
Katie Byford is a poet and filmmaker based in London. She is a Barbican Young Poet alum and the winner of the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. Her current work focuses on trauma, PTSD and recovery.
Katie’s poetry has featured in Magma, bath magg, Popshot, Modern Poetry in Translation and anthologies from Bloodaxe and Macmillan. Her debut pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, was published in 2021 by Oxford Brookes University’s ignitionpress. She has performed her work at the Houses of Parliament, the Barbican Centre and at Durham Castle alongside a full orchestra.
Katie was awarded Best Writer at BFI Future Film Festival 2022 for You Look Fine, her debut short film as writer/director. The film premiered at the 40th Cambridge Film Festival, a BAFTA accredited festival, in November 2021. Katie is developing her second short, a cross-arts film opera project entitled The Styx, which is supported by funding from Arts Council England.
Katie has a BA in Classics from Durham University, where she received the Maltby Exhibition Prize for her dissertation on contemporary translations and artistic interpretations of Sappho’s poetry. She regularly delivers guest lectures at her old department on the use of Greek and Roman sources in her poetry, and has delivered talks and workshops for UCL and secondary schools. In 2015 she founded Thorn, a grassroots collective that promotes engagement between different art forms.
Recent work:
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