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A freelance writer ever since he won the Gregory Award in 1974, Roger Garfitt has been Poetry Critic of London Magazine, Editor of Poetry Review, Writing Fellow at UEA and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Swansea University. He runs Poetry Masterclasses for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education at Madingley Hall. He was married to Frances Horovitz, whose Collected Poems he edited after her early death from cancer. He made another life in Colombia, reporting for Granta and London Review of Books. Now remarried and living in Shropshire, he performs Poetry and Jazz with the John Williams Septet and jazz composer Nikki Iles, and Poetry & Dulcimer Music with Sue Harris on the hammered dulcimer. His Selected Poems, which includes extracts from his journals, is published by Carcanet Press.
He's produced a memoir that deserves to put him on the wider literary map... Garfitt writes beautifully -- James Walton * Daily Mail * Garfitt's eye for the telling details of character...evidence great skill and fine judgment, but it is when he recounts his descent into madness, that the full range of his narrative gifts emerges... Garfitt relates it so vividly that the reader enters into the madman's mind and sees the world from his point of view... A superb achievement -- John Burnside * Guardian * His gentle, coaxing tour across the fervid climbs, lonely sloughs and frustrating plateaus of his early English years has a poetic delicacy of expression... Deeply affecting...The Horseman's Word is a searing act of personal confession * Independent * A pungently beautiful piece of writing... This is no nostalgia piece: Garfitt's rich, vivid reminiscences are alive to the hardship and petty injustices of the times and inextricably entwined with his own ponderous, impassioned attempts to discover and assert his own personality * Metro *
