Elizabeth Cook


Elizabeth Cook was born in Gibraltar in 1952, spent her childhood in Nigeria and Dorset, and these days lives in East London.  She is the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keats, author of Achilles (Methuen and Picador USA), a work of fiction with a performance life, and of Lux (Scribe), a novel encompassing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba and that of the Tudor poet, Thomas Wyatt.  Her poetry, short fiction and critical reviews have appeared in journals including Agenda, The London Review of Books, Poetry London, Stand, Moving Worlds and Tears in the Fence.  She  wrote the libretto for Francis Grier’s The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, jointly commissioned by VocalEssence in Minneapolis and the BBC, and has since collaborated with Grier on a sequence of poems for a Vespers, premiered in 2014 at King’s College Chapel, and a Nativity oratorio, Before All Worlds.  She has been a Hawthornden Fellow and  is  currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary University.  In addition to the full collections published by Worple she has published a pamphlet, The Sound of the Rain, with the Garlic Press (2017).