Linda France was born in Wallsend, Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland.

Her ten full-length poetry collections include: The Toast of the Kit-Cat Club (Bloodaxe 2005), a biography in verse of the 18th century traveller and writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; book of days, a year renga, with ceramic fragments by Sue Dunne (Smokestack 2009); Reading the Flowers (Arc 2016), longlisted for the inaugural Laurel Prize; The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack 2022), Winner of the 2022 Laurel Prize, and Startling (New Writing North & Faber 2022).

Linda also edited the acclaimed anthology Sixty Women Poets (Bloodaxe 1993), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She has published several pamphlets. The most recent is Took My Way Down, Like a Messenger, to the Deep (Blueprint 2023).

She has written touring plays for Théâtre sans Frontières (Diamonds in Your Pockets 1996) and Iron 4 x 4 (I am Frida Kahlo 2005).

Linda was the first Arts Foundation Poetry Fellow in 1993, Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1997, a Hawthornden Fellow in 1999 and 2007, Leverhulme Artist in Residence at Moorbank Botanic Garden, University of Newcastle (2010-11), Policy and Enterprise Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University (2013), Poet in Residence at Cheeseburn Sculpture (Compass, a collaboration with sound recordist Chris Watson, 2016 & 2020) and Creative Writing Fellow at Leeds University (2015-16).  In 2018 she was Exchange Writer at the Centre for British Research in the Levant, Amman, for the first Durham-Jordan Alta’ir Project. She won a Renwick Scholarship to the British School at Rome in 2019.

Her poem ‘Bernard and Cerinthe’ won the Poetry Society’s 2013 National Poetry Competition. Poems of hers have also won the Stand, Larkin & East Riding and Bridlington Competitions.

Linda has taught on Newcastle University’s Creative Writing/Poetry MA since its inception. Her Creative Practice-led PhD – ‘Women on the Edge of Landscape’ – was concerned with Susan Davidson’s landscaping at Allen Banks in Northumberland and Margaret Rebecca Dickinson’s botanical paintings in the Natural History Society of Northumbria’s Archive. The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack 2022), includes poems from this research.

She is a recipient of a 2020 Society of Authors Cholmondley Award and was Journal Culture Awards Writer of the Year 2021. In July 2024 Linda was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Between 2020 and 2022 Linda was Climate Writer for New Writing North and Newcastle University. Her collection Startling arose from this residency, as did the collective film-poems Murmuration (with Kate Sweeney) and Dawn Chorus (with Christo Wallers).

Linda was named the inaugural Environmental Poet of the Year 2022-23 in the Michael Marks Awards for Letters to Katłįà.

Her Arts Council-supported work-in-progress, a nature memoir called A History of Abandonment, was long-listed for the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize.

You can read Linda’s occasional Substack newsletter here.