February Rise Up!

Welcome back to our 2026 Rise Up! poetry series - with three wonderful poets kicking off a fantastic new year: Peter Sansom, Michael Schmidt and Shash Trevett.

Peter Sansom's Carcanet books include a Selected Poems and more recently Lanyard ('It is kind. It is strong. It is beautiful' -- MIR).Bloodaxe publish the best-selling Writing Poems. He received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2016. Peter is co-director with Ann Sansom of The Poetry Business in Sheffield, and has been Company Poet with M&S and the Prudential, and Fellow in Poetry at both Leeds and Manchester universities.

Michael Schmidt is co-founder of Carcanet Press (1969) and PN Review (1972). He is an editor, anthologist, literary historian, critic, one-time novelist, one-time academic, and poet. The Poetry Business has published – all edited by Peter Sansom – his Selected and Very Selected Poems, Talking to Stanley on the Telephone and other slim volumes. https://michaelschmidt.org.uk/ takes you to his website.

Shash Trevett is a poet, critic and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her poetry has been recorded for the Poetry Archive and she is a winner of a Northern Writers’ Award. Her collection The Naming of Names (Smith|Doorstop 2024) was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize 2025 and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize. Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas (Bloodaxe 2023, Penguin India 2023) which she co-edited with Vidyan Ravinthiran and Seni Seneviratne, was one of the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year for 2023. Shash has been a mentor for both New Writing North and the National Centre for Writing, and a panelist for awards run by the Singapore Book Council, the Gratien Trust (Sri Lanka) and English PEN. She is a Ledbury Critic, reviewing for The Poetry Book Society and a Trustee of Modern Poetry in Translation.