Liz Berry

Liz Berry is a British poet born in the Black Country in 1980. She studied English at Birmingham University and has worked as a primary school teacher. Her debut collection Black Country (2014, Chatto & Windus) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and was one of the most acclaimed poetry debuts of the decade. The Home Child (2023, Chatto & Windus) is her second collection, a sequence of poems in the voice of a girl shipped from the Black Country to Canada as part of the Home Children migration scheme — the government-endorsed movement of around 100,000 British working-class children to Canada between 1869 and 1948 to work as farm labourers and domestic servants. The collection won the Rathbones Folio Prize (both the overall prize and the poetry category) in 2024 and the Costa Poetry Award. Berry's poetry is celebrated for its use of Black Country dialect and its capacity to make the local and particular resonate universally.