Naomi Foyle

Foyle was born in London, UK on February 22, 1967. She was brought up in London, Hong Kong, Liverpool and Saskatchewan, and graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in Philosophy in 1990.

In Toronto, Foyle wrote the lyrics to a song cycle based on the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Set to music by composer Allen Cole, the project was performed at the Music Gallery and grew to become Hush: An Opera in Two Bestial Acts, for which Foyle wrote the libretto. Featuring jazz singers Taborah Johnson and Holly Cole, Hush was produced at Theatre Passe Muraille in the autumn of 1990,[5] and won three Dora Mavor Moore Awards, including Best Musical. The same year Foyle wrote the liner notes for Holly Cole's first album, Girl Talk.

In 1991 Foyle returned to the United Kingdom, settling in Brighton, East Sussex, where she worked at radical book shop the Public House Book Shop and published poetry in magazines. Following the death of her mother, British-Canadian writer Brenda Macdonald Riches,[6] she lived in Vancouver from 1994 to 1996, working as the Office Manager and Librarian at the Kootenay School of Writing, and publishing the so-called "L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry" pamphlet Febrifugue (treeplantsink press, 1996). From 1996 to 1997 she travelled in Central America, lived briefly in Saskatchewan and Brighton in 1996–7, recorded songs with various Canadian musicians, and self-published other poetry pamphlets. Between 1997 and 1999 Foyle taught English as a foreign language in Seoul, South Korea, the setting for her first novel, Seoul Survivors. In 1999 her short story "Star Pitch" appeared in the Serpent's Tail anthology Suspect Device, edited by Stewart Home.

Foyle returned to Brighton in 2000, where she read Tarot Cards for a living and continued to publish poetry pamphlets, including Red Hot & Bothered (Lansdowne Press, 2003), edited by poet and folk artist Graham Ackroyd and Canada (Echo Room Press, 2004), edited by Brendan Cleary. A frequent visitor to Belfast since the mid-nineties, following the sudden death of poet and journalist Mairtín Crawford in 2004, she edited and introduced the posthumous Mairtín Crawford: Selected Poems (Lagan Press, 2005).

In 2008 Foyle began an enduring relationship with Waterloo Press (Hove),[7] who published her first two poetry collections (The Night Pavilion (2008) and The World Cup (2010)), and two subsequent pamphlets (Grace of the Gamblers: A Chantilly Chantey, illustrated by Peter Griffiths, and No Enemy but Time (2017), which was launched at the Belfast Book Festival). Mentored by the Director of Waterloo Press and Survivors Poetry, Simon Jenner, Foyle began working as an editor. She has edited twenty collections of poetry including The Privilege of Rain by David Swann (Waterloo Press, 2010), shortlisted for the 2011 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, Tantie Diablesse by Fawzia Muradali Kane, shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and Blue Wallpaper by Robert Hamberger, shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. With Akila Richards, she is currently the co-project manager of LIT UP, an Arts Council England-funded mentoring and publishing programme for emerging poets of colour.[8]

During her doctoral studies (2006-2011), Foyle became involved in the struggle for a just peace in Israel-Palestine. With poet Judith Kazantzis and novelist Irving Weinman, she co-founded British Writers in Support of Palestine (BWISP),[9] an organisation that, prior to being subsumed by Artists for Palestine UK (APUK) campaigned for the cultural and academic boycott of Israel. Between 2009 and 2018, Foyle travelled widely in the Middle East. In 2011, The Strange Wife, her one act verse drama set in Jerusalem, was produced at the Bush Theatre as part of the Sixty-Six Books project. In 2017 she edited the bilingual anthology A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry (Smokestack Books),[10] which was launched in England, Scotland, the US, Jordan, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. From 2013 to 2018 Foyle published five science fiction novels with Jo Fletcher Books (Quercus UK/USA):[11] the standalone cyberchiller Seoul Survivors, named by the Guardian as "among the best in recent SF",[12] and the eco-science fantasy quartet The Gaia Chronicles, comprising Astra, Rook Song, The Blood of the Hoopoe and Stained Light. On the basis of Astra, Library Journal recommended the series "for Hunger Games fans of all ages".[13] During this period Foyle appeared at science fiction conventions in the UK and Canada and published guest blogs,[14][15][16] and an essay in Critical Muslim on the process of writing diverse eco-feminist science fiction.[17]

In 2016, Foyle was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her essay "Cancer: Key to Utopia" appeared in Critical Muslim in 2017.[18] Poems about her diagnosis, treatment and recovery are included in her third poetry collection, Adamantine, which was published by Red Hen/Pighog Press (Pasadena) and launched in America, Canada and the UK in 2019.[19]

Foyle has participated in international literary festivals and events in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, New York City, Western Canada, Berlin, Prague, Portugal, Palestine and Iraq. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Bangor University (2011) and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester. Her various editorial positions also include Creative Writing Editor of Gramarye, the journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.[20]

Works of Foyle have been translated in Ukrainian and Arabic, and published in journals in Ukraine, Iraq and Egypt. She has collaborated with musicians and videomakers on projects including the videopoems "Good Definition", made with Anneliese Holles, and "Going on Crutches to Grenfell Tower", made with Steve Bloom (forthcoming 2020).

• Good Definition won First Prize in the 2004 Hastings Word About Town Literary Festival filmpoem competition.
• The Night Pavilion was an Autumn 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
• Red Hot & Bothered won the 2008 Apples and Snakes "The Book Bites Back" competition.
• "The Scottish Don" won a prize in the satirical poetry section of the 2008 Strokestown International Poetry Competition (Ireland).
• "On Advising a Young Man from Galway to Do a Second MA in Biodiversity" won the 2012 Rialto/RSPB Nature Poetry Competition Additional Prize.
• For her poetry and essays about Ukraine, Foyle was awarded the 2014 Hryhorii Skovoroda Prize (Ukraine).

• Sixty-Six Books

• Naomi Foyle's website
• Poem of the week: Winterpause by Naomi Foyle
• Poem of the week: Your Summer Arm

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