Glyn Maxwell

Of primarily Welsh heritage — his mother Buddug-Mair Powell (b. 1928) acted in the original stage show of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in the West End and on Broadway in 1956 — Maxwell was born and raised in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.

His father James Maxwell (1928-2016) was an industrial chemist.

Maxwell has two brothers, Alun (b. 1960), and David (b. 1964).

His cousin Kerry Lee Powell is a noted Canadian writer.

He studied English at Worcester College, Oxford.

He began an MLitt there but dropped out.

Glyn Maxwell (born 1962) is a British poet, playwright, novelist, librettist, and lecturer.

In 1987 he moved to America to study poetry and drama with Derek Walcott at Boston University.

He returned to the UK and began publishing poetry in the 1990s.

His three earliest collections of poetry, Tale Of The Mayor's Son (1990), Out of the Rain (1992), Rest For The Wicked (1995) are collected as The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (2000).

In the years 1991, 1993 and 1995, Maxwell staged performances of his plays in his parents' garden in Welwyn Garden City.

These were featured in the national press and on radio.

In 1994 he was named one of the New Generation poets and he received the E. M. Forster Award in 1997.

His most recent collections are One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems and Pluto.

His work appears in several anthologies of the best of 20th century poetry.

His first novel, Blue Burneau (1994), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize and the book Moon Country, published in 1996, describes a visit to Iceland with Simon Armitage.

After his marriage and the birth of his daughter Alfie in 1997, he moved with his family to the USA, living and teaching at first in Amherst, Massachusetts, and then in New York City.

In 1999 Maxwell left Faber and Faber as a result of editorial disagreement over his poem Time's Fool, and his work has since been published by Picador in the UK.

In the US he has been published by Houghton Mifflin and Farrar Straus Giroux.

The Nerve won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2004.

All his other collections of poems - The Breakage, Hide Now and Pluto - have been shortlisted for either the T.S.Eliot, Forward, or Costa (formerly Whitbread) Prizes.

He returned to the UK in 2006.

His second novel, The Girl Who Was Going To Die, was published in 2008 by Cape in the UK and by Kunstmann in Germany.

Plays include After Troy (dir. Alex Clifton), a retelling of Euripides' Women of Troy and Hecabe (Oxford Playhouse/Shaw Theatre London), Lily Jones's Birthday a Satyr-play based on Aristophanes' Lysistrata, which premiered at RADA in 2009; Liberty, about the French Revolution, which premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in the 2008 season (dir. Guy Retallack) and toured the UK.

Maxwell's critical guidebook On Poetry (Oberon Books, 2012) was described by Adam Newey in The Guardian as 'the best book about poetry I've ever read' and by Hugo Williams in The Spectator as 'a modern classic'.

In New York, Agamemnon Home (dir. Amy Wagner) received its world premiere in April 2012.

He was awarded the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Prize for his poetry in 2014.

In 2014 he edited a collected edition of the poems of Derek Walcott, The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013.

A stand-alone sequel, titled Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term and set in a mysterious village, was published by Oberon in October 2016.

In this 'brilliantly unclassifiable' work, several deceased poets appear as characters, their speech taken verbatim from their writings.

A sequel, Last Night In England, is in process.

His version of Cyrano de Bergerac was also staged at Southwark Playhouse in 2016 (dir. Russell Bolam) starring Kathryn Hunter.

Several of Maxwell's plays and adaptations have been staged at Chester's Grosvenor Park Open-Air Theatre, or in the city's new Storyhouse Theatre, which opened in 2017 under the Artistic Directorship of Alex Clifton: these were Merlin and the Woods of Time (2011, dir. Alex Clifton), Masters Are You Mad? (2012, dir. Robin Norton-Hale), Cyrano De Bergerac (2013, dir. Lucy Pitman-Wallace), Wind in the Willows (2015, dir. Alex Clifton), The Beggar's Opera, a new version of the John Gay classic, (2017, dir. Alex Clifton), Alice in Wonderland (2017, dir. Derek Bond) and The Secret Seven (2017, dir. Alex Clifton).

Wind in the Willows and The Secret Seven were both nominated as 'Best Play For Young People' at the British Theatre Awards.

In 2018, the rights to Maxwell's epic poem Time's Fool (1999) were optioned by the film director Paul King and the screenwriter Jon Croker, and subsequently bought by Fox Searchlight for development as a feature film, with King and Croker as writers, and David Heyman as producer.

Maxwell co-wrote the screenplay for The Beast In The Jungle, a dance-film based on the Henry James novella, with the film's director Clara Van Gool.

The film premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in February 2019.

It will also feature at the film festivals of Goteborg, San Francisco, New York and Shanghai.

His eighth play for Chester, Jekyll and Hyde, played in autumn 2019 at Storyhouse.

His book of poetry, How The Hell Are You was published by Picador in 2020.