Lucy Burnett was born in South West Scotland but now lives in Todmorden, West Yorkshire where she combines her love of writing, photography, performance and teaching with her love of fellrunning and cycling the local hills. Her first poetry collection, Leaf Graffiti, was published by Carcanet Press / Northern House in 2013. Her second book, Through the Weather Glass, a hybrid novel combining ‘fantastic’ travel writing, poetry and documentary photography, was published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press in 2015 and a second poetry collection called Tripping Over Clouds, is forthcoming with Carcanet / Northern House. Lucy’s work has been published in a variety of magazines:Stand, Poetry Wales, The Scotsman Newspaper, Shadowtrain, Nth Position, Tears in the Fence, The Clearing, Green Lettters, Presence, Chroma, Citizen 32, textyle and Poetry & Audience. In 2007 she was shortlisted for the Chroma International Poetry Prize.

In her creative practice, Lucy is interested in the ‘between’ spaces – between words on a page, words and things, experiment and tradition, poetry and prose, and between literature, visual art and performance. Over recent years this interest in a range of different artistic practices has led her to work across and between disciplines and forms. Throughout 2016 she will be touring an interactive art installation version of Through the Weather Glass around book festivals and other public spaces across the UK with the support of Arts Council England and Leeds Beckett University.  She  is also currently collaborating with internationally renowned OBRA Theatre Co on adapting ‘variations on an urban monotone’ (a sequence from Leaf Graffiti) into a work of physical theatre. Lucy’s visual art practice usually takes the form of text-art or photography, as seen in Through the Weather Glass. She specialises in designing poetry book covers and is currently developing a first solo photography exhibition to accompany the publication of Tripping Over Clouds.

Lucy Burnett currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett University. Previous to that she taught at the Universities of Strathclyde and Salford, where she completed a Creative Writing PhD. She has extensive freelance experience of tutoring students of all ages and in May 2016 will tutor on her first Arvon course with fiction writer Adam Marek. In 2008-09 she worked as Writer-in-Residence for  Balloch Community Woodland project / Creetown Primary school in Galloway, creating a pamphlet of haiku / line drawings called The Whinnie Face, poems from which were inscribed in a new poetry stone circle in the local woodland. In 2014-2015 she managed Lumb Bank for the Arvon Foundation. Earlier in her career she worked as an environmental campaigner for organisations like Friends of the Earth and Ramblers Scotland, but has also managed a café, collected recycling, grown potatoes, sold magazines to hairdressers, marketed a rural arts centre, x-rayed the mail looking for bombs and hit broccoli with a big long stick as ways to earn a living. Just because someone has to / she could.