Scenes from North Tawton, author's childhood home.

 I'm Julie Sampson, full-time independent Writer and Researcher with a previously varied career, which has included the following:

Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at a number of Educational places, including The University of the West of England; Somerset College of Arts and Technology; Honiton, South Molton, Street, Chard and Tiverton Community Colleges; Examiner of A level and GCSE English  Literature and Language for  London University; Tutor for Oxford Open Learning; Piano Teacher at Taunton School; Primary School Teacher. 

I gained a PhD at the University of Exeter in 1997, on the writer H.D.

Although sadly at the moment I'm not able to live there, my love of Devon - its landscape, history and literature - is lifelong. I was born and brought up in the county and almost all my ancestral lines are deeply rooted within in the county. 

Nowadays I research and write the history of Devon's women writers (until circa 1960) and am completing a non-fiction/hybrid book based on my research. I write essays and features about my research including the following:

My paper on C16 Devon writer Anne Dowriche, published in Transactions of the Devonshire Association, in 2009; an essay Sea-thyme in the Southwest; H.D.’s Se/a/cret Garden, appeared in H.D's Web Newsletter, 2011.

I keep an occasional blog, Women Write the Devon Land.

I'm also a poet and have had poems published in a variety of small-press magazines and anthologies: feature poet in  PQR (Poetry Quarterly Review, no. 17, 2000);  the anthology Her Mind's Eye (Pyramid Press, 1997); the anthology Iron Erotica (Iron Press); the anthology Making Worlds (Second Light Publications,2003); the anthology Visible Breath (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2010); the anthology Places of Poetry; Mapping the Nation in Verse (Oneworld 2020); and the anthology Locked Down; Poems, diary extracts and art from the 2000 pandemic (Poetry Space, 2021);  My poems are also forthcoming in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, Ed., Sarah Law, Amethyst Review.

I've been lucky to have some success in literary competitions, including, in recent years: short-listed for The Impress Prize, 2015;  shortlisted Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize, 2019; an Honourable Mention, in the James Tate Memorial Prize, 2022.

I edited Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems (Shearsman), in 2009. A poetry collection Tessitura, was published in 2013, (Shearsman). It Was When It Was When It Was came out with Dempsey & Windle, in 2018. Fivestones, the latest collection, was published by Lapwing Publications, in 2022. 

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