Fred Beake

Fred Beake grew up in the West Riding of Yorkshire, spent some time as a full-time writer near Whitby before moving to Bath where he worked as a bookseller, van driver, gardener etc. as well as being a hands-on parent. In the 80s and 90s he edited then co-edited, The Poets Voice, and ran Mammon Press,, publishing a number of books and pamphlets by writers including Jon Silkin and Fiona Pitt Kethley. He was the first Chairman of the Avon Poetry Festival in the mid 1980s before going back to university at Bristol in 2000 where he gained a degree in Classics. In 2003 he moved to Torquay 2011 where he became an active member of the Poets Torbay Group.
He published a number of pamphlets in the 70’s and 80’s and since then has published five full-length collections, most recently New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Old Outlaw( Shoestring 2011). Two of his translations are in the W.W.Norton anthology World Poetry. His modern French versions from Char, Desnos etc are collected in The Bees of the Horizon (Etruscan 2005).