Kate Simpson

Kate Simpson is an award-winning poet, editor, producer, and critic, named, by the Guardian, as part of the poetry community ‘rising to meet the challenge’ of global heating. She is the former Associate Editor of Aesthetica Magazine and has independently edited for Faber and Valley Press. Her anthology, Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency (2021) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation – lauded as the ‘definitive anthology for this decisive decade’ and was selected as a Guardian Book of the Year. She reviews poetry and fiction for The Telegraph and has written for Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Poetry London, PNR, The London Magazine and Cambridge University Press.

Her collaborators have included ClientEarth, Friends of the Earth, BBC, Apple, Tate, and XR Writers, and she has judged competitions for Sony, Audible, Rialto and Ambit. She has programmed for international festivals including the BAFTA-Qualifying Aesthetica Film Festival, Durham Book Festival and VERVE Poetry Festival and was the inaugural producer of Summit, an ecopoetry festival in partnership with the poet laureate Simon Armitage, Poetry School, National Poetry Centre, National Landscapes Association, and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

She has performed at Kew Gardens and the Royal Geographical Society, and in 2024, she was commissioned to write and perform an elegy for the 5th Anniversary of the Memorial for Okjökull glacier, sponsored by UNESCO, in the lead-up to the UN’s declaration of 2025 as the ‘Official Year of Glaciers’ Preservation’. She is part of the UK’s first Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme at the University of Leeds, where she is working on a debut collection exploring the literary representation of mass extinction events.