Diana Hendry
Born in the Wirral, growing up by the sea, Diana Hendry has gone on to become a poet, short story writer and the author of many children’s books. She has worked as a journalist, an English teacher and a tutor in creative writing for the Open University, the University of Bristol and the Arvon Foundation. She lives in Edinburgh.
Her poetry took first prize in the 1996 Housman Society Competition and from 1997-8 she was Writer in Residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary. In 2007, together with Hamish Whyte, Diana was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship and from 2008-10 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She was co-editor of New Writing Scotland from 2015-2017 and for many years she has reviewed fiction for The Spectator. Currently she is assistant Editor at Mariscat Press, Edinburgh.
Diana has published five full collections of poetry plus three pamphlets as well as No Homework Tomorrow (Glowworm Books, 2003), a collection for children. A new collection The Insomniac’s Café (Worple Press) is due out later in 2022. Earlier work includes the libretto for a choral work, The Pied Piper, music by John G. Mortimer, which was performed in Switzerland in 2013. In 2015 she was one of the poets invited to write on the theme of creativity and age by the Baring Foundation, and her poems on the subject, together with those of Douglas Dunn and Vicki Feaver, can be found in the resulting anthology, Second Wind (Saltire Society, 2015).
Beyond poetry, 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), was shortlisted for a Costa Award and 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.