DAVID MORLEY read Zoology at Bristol University and pursued research on acid rain. With Jeremy Treglown he founded the Writing Programme in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick where he develops and teaches new practices in scientific as well as creative writing and theatre writing. His collection Scientific Papers appeared from Carcanet in 2002. He has received a major Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie Award from Northern Arts, a Hawthornden Fellowship, an Arts Council Writers Award, a Creative Ambitions Award, and an Arts Council Fellowship in Writing at Warwick University.

His anthology of new writing for the National Health Service The Gift (Stride) was given free to all 31,000 N.H.S. workers in Birmingham. His anthology of public artwork poems Phoenix New Writing (Heaventree Press) won the Raymond Williams Prize. His textual public artworks include collaborations with thesculptors/artists David Annand, Jochen Gerz, Kate Whiteford and David Ward. He co-edited The New Poetry for Bloodaxe, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. A handbook, Under the Rainbow: Writers and Artists in Schools is published by Bloodaxe/Northern Arts. His work hasappeared in The British Council's New Writing and Faber's Poetry Introduction anthologies. New projects include an anthology of new Romanian writing, No Longer Poetry, and The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. He reviews poetry for The Guardian.

David Morley's poetry could be seen on London's Tube as part of the Poems on the Underground series.

'A linguistic playground full of marvels'

D.A. Prince, Under the Radar

'A rich and musical collection with a sharp political bite... there's something magical about reading the poems first for the sheer verbal play of the language, the sparking, luminous sounds it makes in the mouth and paints on the mind... FURY has an enormous range, and handles its politics with sensitivity and power'

Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times

 'David Morley's FURY is published by Carcanet. Sonnets meet pantoums in this festival of loves and voices, the air is full of birds, fury meets gentleness, and every poem is deeply interested in what language makes of us... FURY controls its furies with ever inventive craftsmanship.'

Alexandra Harris, Chair of Judges, The Forward Prize

 

'...poems which all possess such showmanship and sonic agility... Morley's poetics of mimicry and ventriloquism echo the collection's subjects of displaced peoples and species, illustrating the virtuosity of voice, in a mutually reinforcing loop.'

The Poetry Review

 

'Morley's mastery of poetics comes into full effect as he introduces more and more Romany words in his poems... Morley connects us simultaneously to the past and the present, to our world and the natural world. An ecologist and naturalist, David Morley's attention to the natural world is particular and more acute than most... David Morley's Fury is an exhibition of poetic prowess and skilful storytelling that extends his interests in the legacy of Gypsy people from his previous collections. Readers can expect to be treated to a force of nature in poetics, linguistic dexterity and storytelling.'

H.M. Hussain, DURA Dundee

 

'In FURY, Morley's concerns combine as never before into a keening, politicised call to pay attention to the missing, the lost, and the deliberately elided [...] Morley's trademark fusion of Romani and English "Angloromani" forges afresh his lyric gifts'

Sinead Morrissey, PBS Autumn Bulletin

 'The poems of  FURY are acts of radical connection across cultures and language... FURY comes with a hard political edge too, in elegies for cultural loss: "All the nameless people named here. / The story ends with who we were."'

Aingeal Clare, The Guardian

 'In this daring new collection, Morley holds a mirror up to the myriad of irresponsible ways that we as humans influence the natural world and how we treat one another... Threaded with Romanes - as Morley's poems often are - this is a celebration of the Roma tongue as well as the people and places gone by... To read Fury is to tread a pilgrimage along the oldest putèka. To know these paths is to be compelled to walk them again, to feel the trembling pride for our ethnicity and to sing once more of home.'

Jo Clement, Travellers Times

'Morley is a master of the integrity of wholes and parts. A fabulous collection of poems...'
Dundee University Review of the Arts


'T'he strange atmospherics suffuse every page while the balance struck between mystery and disclosure can be breathtaking...Such moments led me to feel that Morley had not so much created a new universe as uncovered one. Any universe is bound together by language; and Morley brings Romany vocabulary fizzing and crackling into our consciousness'
Tim Liardet, Guardian 'Enchantment by David Morley is a linguistic feast...'
Jonathan Bate Sunday Telegraph Books Of The Year 2010

Awards won by David Morley Short-listed, 2020 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (FURY) Winner, 2015 Poetry Society Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry (The Invisible Gift )