Penny Boxall is a poet and children’s writer whose work draws inspiration from interpretations of history. She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (Scotland’s largest poetry prize) with her debut collection, Ship of the Line. Her fourth poetry book, The Curiosities, about the materiality of memory, was published in June 2024.

She has held residencies in England, Scotland, Wales, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Iceland, Norway and Latvia. In Oxford, her current home city, she was 2023-4 writer-in-residence at Wytham Woods and (in 2019) Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College. She has held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships at the Universities of York and Cambridge, and is now an RLF Bridge Fellow in schools in Oxford and the Midlands. Together with Maarja Pärtna and composer Liis Ring, she created an installation, Siin Oli Soo/Once was Mire for Tartu Capital of Culture 2024. She has collaborated with palaeontologist Dr Frankie Dunn and composer Dr Jane Boxall on ‘Replaying the Tape’, an experimental new work about chance and evolution.

Her debut novel for children, Letty and the Mystery of the Golden Thread, is published by Puffin, and was Blackwell’s Book of the Month. Elsa and the Shadow Theatre, her children’s novel in verse, is published by Hodder Rising Stars.