Lawrence Sail

Lawrence Sail is a freelance writer who was brought up, and still lives, in Exeter.He read French and German at St John’s College, Oxford, taught for four years in Kenya, then held various teaching posts in England.

He hasbeen a visiting reader and lecturer for the British Council in various countries, including Bosnia, Colombia, Egypt, France, India, Kenya, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Ukraine. In 2012 he recorded a selection of his work for The Poetry Archive and a number of his poems, including a sequence on the theme of silence, have been set to music. He has been chairman of the Arvon Foundation and programme director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.  He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1992, and an Arts Council Writer’s Bursary the following year. He was on the management committee of the Society of Authors from 2007 to 2011 and, in 2011, president of the U.K. jury for the European Literature Prize.  In 2004 he received a Cholmondeley Award for his poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.