Folding the Real

by Fiona Sampson

Surviving a murder attempt generates the clarity, compression and pure celebratory drive of this book's title sequence of fourteen syllabic sonnets. These form the spinal cord of the entire collection, from which nerve endings reach out into a dizzying range of poetic matter, while retaining the book's essential coherence and integrity and what Maura Dooley calls "Fiona Sampson's incisive, inquisitive, painterly eye". Fiona Sampson has published ten books, including four collections of poetry, philosophy of language and books on the writing process; she is also the Founder-Editor of Orient Express . She has won many awards, including the Zlaten Prsten of Macedonia, and been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is the Editor of Poetry Review .

120 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2001

About the author

Fiona Ruth Sampson, MBE is an English poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing.

Sampson was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, and following a brief career as a concert violinist, studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize. She gained a PhD in the philosophy of language from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She advises internationally on creative writing in healthcare, a field whose development she pioneered in a number of projects and publications. As a young poet she was the founder-director of Poetryfest – the Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival and the founding editor of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from Europe. She has received a number of international writers' fellowships: I.A. Literary Association, Skojcan, Slovenia, 2015, Greek Writers’ Union Writers’ and Translators’ House, Paros, 2011, Estonian Writers’ Union House, Kasmu, 2009, Heinrich Boll House, Achill Island, 2005, Fundacion Valparaiso, Spain, 2002, Hawthornden Castle, 2001, Fondacion da Casa de Mateus, Portugal, 2001. She held an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University 2002-5, a CAPITAL Fellowship in Creativity at the University of Warwick 2007-8 and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, Institute of Musical Research & Institute of English Studies: 2012-15.

From 2005-12, Sampson was the editor of Poetry Review, the oldest and most widely read poetry journal in the UK. She was the first woman editor of the journal since Muriel Spark (1947–49). In January 2013 she founded Poem, a quarterly international review, published by the University of Roehampton, where Sampson is Professor of Poetry and the Director of Roehampton Poetry Centre.

She lives in Herefordshire.