Richard Price
Richard Price is recognized as a critical voice of his generation, a poet who moves comfortably between prose, lyricism and the avant-garde as an influential figure in the literary movement which he himself coined ‘Informationist poetry’. In addition, he has written fiction, collaborated with sculptors, digital artists, photographers and musicians.
Born in 1966, he grew up in Renfrewshire, and began writing poetry at the age of 14. After leaving school, he trained as a journalist at Napier College, Edinburgh, before taking a degree in English and Librarianship at the University of Strathclyde. The year he graduated, Price came top of his year in each subject and won the joint Glasgow universities creative writing prize.
Alongside such writers as Robert Crawford, W. N. Herbert and Peter McCarey, Price was the youngest member of a group titled the Informationists. They each set out their collective vision, most notably perhaps, in the Contrafow on the Superhighway anthology (1994). The keys lay in technological jargon, idiosyncrasy, dictionary pilferings and patterns of movement within our ‘information society’ as viewed through a political, and disarmingly affectionate lens that leaves a nuanced and varied humorous take.
In the 1990s, Price co-edited the poetry magazines Gairfish, Verse, and Southfields. At this time he also co-ran the poetry publisher Vennel Press, publishing books by himself and his Informationist peers. Since 2000, he has edited and published the pamphlet periodical Painted, Spoken.
From 2003 to 2010 he was Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library in London, curating exhibitions which included Migrant and the Possibility of Poetry (centred on the magazine of the poet Gael Turnbull and artist’s books), and The Page is Printed, about Ted Hughes’s small press publications. At the Library he co-developed the UK-wide Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlets Awards, inspired by the Callum Macdonald Awards developed by Tessa Ransford, and which continue to this day. He is now the Head of Contemporary British Collections, overseeing the British Library’s curating of manuscripts, digital and printed publications, and sound recordings.
Since Lucky Day (2005), shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the major independent publisher Carcanet has published Price’s poetry alongside his work with small and artist’s presses. Price’s longer collections include Greenfields (Carcanet, 2007), shortlisted for the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Poetry Prize, and The Owner of the Sea: Three Inuit Stories Retold (Carcanet, 2021), a Scotsman poetry book of the year.
In 2012 his poem ‘Hedge Sparrows’ was chosen to represent the UK in the Olympics project The Written World. Later that year he published the collection Small World, also from Carcanet, which the poet Caroline Clark has hailed as an example of ‘the new personal’ and which won the SMIT Creative Scotland Poetry Award.
He was European Poet in Residence at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in 2013 and has himself taught poetry online via the Poetry School, London.
In 2014, Slovakian filmmaker Viera Cakanyova made a short documentary about Price which includes him reading ‘Hedge Sparrows’ and can be viewed here.
Price has written a short story collection, A Boy in Summer (11:9 / Neil Wilson, 2002), a novel, The Island (Two Ravens, 2010), and is a vocalist and the principal lyricist for the musical projects Mirabeau and more recently, The Loss Adjustors. His poetry has been translated into French, Finnish, German, Hungarian and Portuguese.
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Further Information
From the Library Catalogue
Learning Resources
Hedge Sparrows by Richard Price
Classroom resource for the poem Hedge Sparrows by Richard Price. Activities in this resource are aimed at pupils in upper primary school (P5–P7).
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