A Bit about Me and My Work

My new collection, A Whistling of Birds, is out in the UK (Nine Arches) and in South Africa (Human & Rousseau). Both editions feature a selection of Scottish nature artist Douglas Robertson’s beautiful illustrations. For more information you can read the UK press release or see more information and reviews on the Collections page of this website, which features my previous books too. Recordings of my reading of ‘The Woburn Robin’ and other short poem videos can be found on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

In 2016 Bearings was published by Nine Arches Press in the UK and Modjaji Books in South Africa . Nine Arches also re-issued my earlier collections A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator in 2018 and will publish my next collection The Landing in 2026.

In 2016, Edinburgh-based Mariscat Press published The Leonids, a pamphlet of 17 poems centred around my force-of-nature mother, Ann Dixon, who died in 2015. These poems form a central part of my forthcoming collection The Landing.

I also love commissions and what you can learn from them, like contributing to Michael McKimm's anthology MAP: Poems After William Smith's Geological Map of 1815, which fed my fascination with maps. In 2017 I was pleased to be part of another Worple Press anthology, The Tree Line: Poems for Trees, Wood & People, celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest.

You can read more about these and other publications (like joint work on the sinking of RMS Titanic, The Debris Field and taking part in the Psycho Poetica project) on this site, along with details of forthcoming readings, some poems and the odd snippet of news.

For more on both my publishing life and my poetry, here is Jaco Botha's interview for LitNet, The People Behind the Books (albeit from quite a while ago now!).

If you like Instagram, I'm @isobelmdixon, where I'll also occasionally share some news. & I very occasionally pop a longer piece on my ‘Toktokkie’ journal page as well.
 

A Bit About My Life (so far...)
 

I was born in Mthatha in the Transkei region of South Africa's Eastern Cape province. There my Scottish father was Dean of the Cathedral, and a science teacher at St John’s College. My mother was born in Alice and grew up on a farm in the Bedford district, both also in the Eastern Cape. When I was three years old, my father's asthma forced us to move inland from the Wild Coast in search of a drier climate. So the Transkei’s misty hills and the Karoo’s semi-desert are both landscapes I love.

In Graaff-Reinet, my parents bought a rambling old house that no one else seemed to want, but which was perfect for them, their four daughters – with a fifth soon to follow – and a plethora of books. I grew up there, my father and mother both died there, one of my sisters still lives there, and we have more books than ever.

I studied English Literature at Stellenbosch in the Cape’s wine country, before following my father's roots and heading to Scotland for postgraduate study in Edinburgh in 1993. In those days I thought I’d become an academic but sitting exams on Derrida on the day of South Africa’s momentous 1994 elections (having voted in Glasgow in the morning) made me realise I wanted to do something more creative, more 'grass roots'.

I studied further in Applied Linguistics, writing a thesis on adult literacy programmes in the new South Africa, intending to go back and work in the field. But my husband’s Masters and PhD study meant a move to London instead, and then on to Cambridge. I tumbled into publishing, and found myself perfectly at home, thrilled to be working with writers; among them several South African authors I had long admired. I learned a great deal and had so much fun working with Carole Blake for more than twenty years, till her sudden death in October 2016. I miss her every day, but feel proud and privileged to be able to continue her legacy now as Managing Director and Head of Books at Blake Friedmann.

If you are seeking to contact me about the literary agenting side of things, please go to my page and the submissions info on the Blake Friedmann site.

Since the leap into publishing I’ve lived happily in two worlds, returning home to my family in South Africa a couple of times a year and commuting from Cambridge to London. The work I do is varied, absorbing and inspiring and I make space in the first early hours of the day and on the train to work on poems (in-between reading and editing manuscripts…) and London, well, who can tire of London?  I love the city, its history and multiculturalism, and all the artistic energies and opportunities it offers. It’s here that I went to Michael Donaghy’s City University course for a couple of years, and met other poets with whom I have read, workshopped and published over the last decade. You can read more about much-missed Michael Donaghy and his influence in my essay, ‘Let Me Into Your Grief: “Home Burial” by Robert Frost’, included by Michael’s wife Maddy Paxman on the website ‘Wordshop Revisited: Students remember the extraordinary teaching of poet Michael Donaghy’.

All in all, I feel very fortunate.