Combining poetry with the long essay, 'Thirty Ways of Looking at the Sea', which charts her involvement with the Marine Conservation Society as resident poet as they launched an appeal to tackle the threats facing thirty marine species, Words the Turtle Taught Me sees Susan Richardson writing at the height of her powers as a poet, an ecological campaigner and as a writer about the process of composing inventive, compelling poems.

Prizes

Short-listed for Ted Hughes Award 2018

"Richardson is adept at mixing wit with sorrow … [and believes] that creating beauty through artistic endeavours is an act of defiance against 'the ugliness of human-induced extinction.' … Words The Turtle Taught Me is a clarion call on behalf of the ocean and its creatures. It will appeal to those who are involved with marine conservation, but also others, like me, who are new to the subject." — Maria Apichella, New Welsh Review, Review 19, February, 2019; "Susan Richardson's work is a suspended state, caught between the us we presume to be and the species with which we share this watery, fragile planet. Cut and precise, archaic and innovative, transcendent and in-the-moment, she sees the life of the sea as a mirror of ourselves, and vice versa: always changing, always the same." — Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan & The Sea Inside

Susan Richardson is a poet, performer, educator and editor, whose three previous collections, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, Where the Air is Rarefied and skindancing were published by Cinnamon Press. In addition to her recent residency with the Marine Conservation Society, she is currently poet-in-residence with the global animal welfare initiative, World Animal Day. Susan has performed at festivals throughout the UK, for organisations such as WWF and Friends of the Earth, on BBC 2, Radio 4 and at universities both nationally and internationally. She co-edits Zoomorphic, the digital literary magazine that publishes work in celebration and defence of wild animals.