Lucy Hamilton was born in Norfolk where she grew up with her French mother and English father, the youngest of six children, including a twin sister. She lived in Paris for a couple of years in her late teens.
On her return from Paris she lived in Aberdeen working for Community Service Volunteers in a home for boys in Care aged from two to sixteen years.
Teaching
After studies in French, English, and Humanities at the University of Birmingham School of Education, she began teaching in London (Whitechapel and Brixton) and continued her career in many parts of the UK. Most recently, she worked for several years at Ashford School, Kent, teaching English as an Alternative Language across the curriculum to Chinese and South Korean boarding students.
Editing
Lucy co-edited Long Poem Magazine from its inception in 2008 until 2018. Since 2015 she has worked as a freelance writer and editor for Cam Rivers Publishing ― a UK-China partnership based at King’s College, Cambridge. Lucy has enjoyed work-residencies in Sichuan and Jiangxi provinces and elsewhere in mainland China. She is a co-ordinator and speaker for the annual International Xu Zhimo Poetry & Art Festival at King’s College. She was awarded the Xu Zhimo Lifelong Achievement Award 2023.
Poetry
Lucy was joint-winner of the Poetry School Award 2006/7. She has published a pamphlet Sonnets for my Mother (Hearing Eye, 2009), and two collections of prose poems: Stalker (Shearsman Books, 2012), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Of Heads & Hearts (Shearsman Books, 2018). She has written two book-length verse translations from French prose epics (original language Arabic), from which several excerpts have been published.
Workshops & Mentoring
Lucy has devised and run many workshops, including sessions for The Poetry School, Staffordshire University, and for post-graduates at the University of Cambridge: the Scott Polar Research Institute, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and the Institute for Continuing Education (ICE). She continues to work as a freelance mentor and as a freelance tutor on the Master of Studies (MSt) creative writing Poetry Module at ICE.
Current Work
‘Travelling with the I Ching’:
In this work, Lucy draws upon Taoist Master Alfred Huang’s seminal literary work, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation. In China the I Ching is considered to be its most ancient book of wisdom, believed to predate Confucius by 2000 years. The title translates as The Book of Changes, or The Classic of Changes. It is believed to encompass every aspect of human experience in a continuing and ever-changing flux of events from the beginning of Heaven and Earth to their end, and so back to the beginning. In her work Lucy is attempting to connect her experiences in China with Huang’s commentaries on the I Ching and their pictorial ideograms and six-line hexagrams, which have continuing relevance to today’s world. Huang’s printed symbols are presented in original calligraphies by her friend and colleague Sophie Jianghong Song.
You can read some of these poems in The Fortnightly Review, Stand and Long Poem Magazine.
‘Reverse / Inverse’:
Lucy is also working on her third collection of prose poems. ‘Reverse / Inverse’ is presented in a prose-poem form which evolved over a period of time. Each poem consists of two equal parts of ten (or eleven) lines, and each part begins and ends with its own particular sentence. The collection is her most personal, with themes on family, twins, French / English heritage; and also on her readings of French language semi-autobiographical novels by colonial and post-colonial authors, and by other writers non-native to France. More generally, language is a continuing theme of the collection, which includes reference to the work of artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Michaux, and to Chinese pictorial characters and calligraphy.
Some of these poems are featured in Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom (MadHat Press, 2023) which you can find on Amazon.
Lucy Hamilton Poetry 