Carol Rumens is a British poet, writer, professor, and translator whose work focuses on history, language, origins, and the magic in the mundane. Originally from the neighborhood of Forest Hill in South London, Rumens has lived and traveled widely in Belfast, Wales, Russia, and Eastern Europe. A concern with “elsewhere” greatly informs her work, including her many Russian translations. Critics have described Rumens’s verse as being simultaneously demotic and syntactically complex.
Rumens is the author of sixteen poetry collections, two novels, and three plays. She has also translated the work of Russian poets such as Osip Mandelstam. She received the Prudence Farmer Prize in 1981 and the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 1984, and was a joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for Unplayed Music (1981). Over Rumen’s career, she has held the post of Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull and contributed widely to literary journalism. According to her website, all of her work is informed by her love for poetry.
Carol Rumens is a British poet and professor whose work is informed by history, language, origins, and the magic in the mundane. Her poem “The Émigrée,” first published in the 1983 collection Star Whisper, expresses the way that nothing—even war,...
