Julie Sampson is an independent writer, researcher, and poet, with a background in literature, creative writing, and education. Her career has included teaching literature and creative writing at a range of institutions, including the University of the West of England and Somerset College of Arts and Technology, as well as work as an examiner for A-level and GCSE English Literature and Language, a tutor for Oxford Open Learning, and a piano teacher at Weirfield (now Taunton School).
She was awarded a PhD by the University of Exeter in 1997 for her doctoral research on the C20 writer H.D.
Although not currently resident in the county, Sampson’s engagement with Devon — its landscape, history, and literary culture — is lifelong. She was born and brought up in Devon, and her family history is deeply rooted there. Her current research focuses on women writers with Devon connections, from the early modern period to the mid-twentieth century, and she is completing a non-fiction hybrid book based on this work.
Her research has appeared in a number of publications, including two papers on the sixteenth-century Devon writer Anne Dowriche in Transactions of the Devonshire Association (2009), and the essay Sea-thyme in the South-West: H.D.’s Se/a/cret Garden, published in H.D.’s Web Newsletter (2011). She also maintains an occasional blog, Women Writing on the Devon Land.
Alongside her research, Sampson is a well-published poet. Her work has appeared in many small-press magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Quarterly Review (feature poet, no. 17, 2000), Her Mind’s Eye (Pyramid Press, 1997), Iron Erotica (Iron Press), Making Worlds (Second Light Publications, 2003), Fanfare (Second Light 2015), Visible Breath (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2010), Peeking Cat Anthology, 2017, Places of Poetry: Mapping the Nation in Verse (Oneworld, 2020), and Locked Down: Poems, Diary Extracts and Art from the 2020 Pandemic (Poetry Space, 2021); and inThin Places & Sacred Spaces, edited by Sarah Law (Amethyst Review, 2024).
She has been shortlisted for a number of literary awards, including the Impress Prize (2015) and the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize (2019), and received an Honourable Mention in the James Tate Memorial Prize (2022).
She edited Mary Lady Chudleigh: Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2009). Her poetry collections are Tessitura (Shearsman, 2013), It Was When It Was When It Was (Dempsey & Windle, 2018), and Fivestones (Lapwing Publications, 2022).
Julie Sampson 