Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag's Leap, she is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of many other awards and honours. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isidor Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.
In Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... Remarkable. * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* * Perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation. * Telegraph * Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressive intimacy: a willingness to write. * New York Times * A brilliant and fearless poet. -- Joyce Carol Oates, author of Black Water Always fearlessly focused on the body and sensual experience, Olds getting older just finds new worlds of taboo to conquer... Astonishing. * Sunday Times * Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I'll be reading her till I die. -- Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron Drawing on an unflinching interrogation of the self, these poems pulse with energy. * Guardian * Balladz showcases the range of Sharon Olds... The whole collection follows the fragility of life, the acceptance of aging, and the reckoning of America. * Electric Lit, *Favourite Poetry Collections of 2022* *