Collected Poems

King's Gold Medal for Poetry
Winner of the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2025
A Guardian Book of the Year 2024
A London Review Bookshop Book of the Year 2024

Mimi Khalvati, one of our best-loved poets, was born in Tehran, Iran, and sent away to boarding school on the Isle of Wight at the age of six, only returning to her family in Iran when she was seventeen. The loss of her native country, culture and mother tongue formed the bedrock of her adoptive love of the English language and its lyric tradition. 'But,' she says, 'whether drawing on my few memories of Iran, my long years in London and travelling in the Mediterranean, or on that central void always facing me, I have celebrated the richness of a life that can be lived without a clear sense of heritage, family history or personal biography.'

That wealth is reflected in the wide variety of style, tone and architecture in her Carcanet poetry collections over thirty-three years – free and metrical verse, ranging from short, fixed forms to extended lyrical sequences, from ghazals to the heroic corona or book-length series of sonnets. 'I hope', she writes, 'the poems speak especially to those who have made their homes wherever the tide has brought them, sometimes in language itself, and to those who have no story but place their trust in the flux and flow, the vision of the lyric moment.'

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She has lived most of her life in London. After training at Drama Centre London, she worked as an actor in the UK and as a director at the Theatre Workshop Tehran and on the fringe in London. She has published nine poetry collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, The Weather Wheel, a PBS Commendation and a book of the year in The Independent, and Afterwardness, a book of the year in The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She was a co-winner of the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition 1989 and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. She has been Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa as the recipient of the William B. Quarton International Writing Program Scholarship, at the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, City University. She is the founder of The Poetry School and has co-edited its three anthologies of new writing published by Enitharmon Press. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Award and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society. In 2023 she was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

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Summary

Author Biography

Supplemental Materials