Diana Hendry grew up by the sea and has worked as a journalist and English teacher and has tutored in creative writing for the University of Bristol, the Open University and the Arvon Foundation. Her poetry has won a number of awards, including first prize in the 1996 Housman Society Competition. She was Writer in Residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary 1997-1998 and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Edinburgh 2008-2010. She lives in Edinburgh.
She has published seven collections of poetry for adults and one for children. In 2013 she wrote the libretto for a choral work, The Pied Piper, music by John G. Mortimer, which was performed in Switzerland. In 2015 she was one of the poets invited to write on the themes of older age by the Baring Foundation, and her poems on the subject can be found in the resulting anthology, Second Wind (Saltire Society, 2015).
Diana Hendry’s short stories have been widely published and broadcast. She has also published more than forty books for children including Harvey Angell which won a Whitbread Award in 1991, and her novel for young adults,The Seeing (2012), is included on the Sunday Times list of 100 children’s modern classics. Two of her picture books have been dramatised by Blunderbus Theatre Company. She has also published a collection of poems for children, No Homework Tomorrow (Glowworm Books, 2003).
Diana was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship in 2007. In 2016 and 2017 she co-edited New Writing Scotland.