Forty years on the page, the stage, and the skin.
Joolz Denby has spent four decades as a working poet — one of a handful of British performers to build a career entirely across the page and the stage. She’s judged national bursaries, been folded into GCSE teaching curricula through the Oxford University Press Headwork English programme, and had her poetry carried by Virgin Books, Bloodaxe and Comma Press.
She has played the marquees at Glastonbury twenty-five times — once to a crowd of two thousand, broadcast live on national television.
She’s taken the stage at five Edinburgh Festivals, Roskilde, Reading and Liss Ard, and represented England at international arts festivals from Canada to Israel to Poland, including a residency at Vancouver’s Western Front Arts Centre and a spring lecture tour of German universities on performance poetry.
On air, she’s a regular of Radio Four and was a three-year fixture of Mark Radcliffe’s late-night show on Radio One. Her novel Stone Baby won the Crime Writers’ Association’s New Crime Writer of the Year; Billie Morgan was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her spoken-word albums have set poetry to music with collaborators including Jah Wobble, Justin Sullivan and Mik Davis, and — most recently — German composer Henning Nugel on Crow.