Mimi Khalvati – Year of election 2009

Mimi Khalvati is the author of six collections of poetry, beginning with In White Ink (1991). In 2006 she received a Cholmondeley Award. Born in Tehran, she says she has “never taken language for granted”. She was sent to boarding school in the Isle of Wight at the age of six, speaking only Farsi; later, after an English education, she had to learn Farsi all over again. She trained as an actor and director, and now lives in London, where in 1997 she founded the Poetry School, which offers a programme of classes – from one-day workshops to year-long courses – to teach adults to write poetry. She has been Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail, a Royal Literary Fund fellow at City University and Bergeron Fellow at the American School in London.

Khalvati has said that she is less interested in the content of her writing than in the ways of doing it. “When you're writing a poem,” she explains, "there’s a strange feeling that the poem pre-exists, that it’s out there, and also that it exists outside you. And in writing the poem you are taking it from the outside and bringing it back in . . . By finding it through language, it becomes visible. The magic is how the particular metre or rhyme . . . reveals what’s out there.”