Polly Atkin grew up in Nottingham and lived in East London for seven years before moving to Cumbria. Her first full poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren, 2017) is followed by a third pamphlet, With Invisible Rain (New Walk Press, 2018), which draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s late journals to articulate pain. She is a Penguin Random House WriteNow mentee for a non-fiction book reflecting on place, belonging and chronic illness, which combines her interests in hybrid memoir, nature writing and Disability Studies. An extract from this, Swimming against the Nature Cure, was published in March 2020 in Ache magazine.

She has taught English and Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London, Lancaster University and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. In 2019 she co-founded the Open Mountain initiative with Kendal Mountain Literature Festival, which seeks to centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing.