About

Nia Davies was born in Sheffield and lives in Wales. Her first book-length collection of poems All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) follows the pamphlets England (Crater, 2017),  Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words (Hafan/Boiled String, 2016) and Then Spree (Salt, 2012).

She has been editor of the international quarterly magazine  Poetry Wales since 2014.

Her poems and essays have been published and translated widely and she has appeared at several international festivals. She has worked on and co-curated transcultural collaborative projects – Literature Across Frontiers, Wales Literature Exchange, Wales International Poetry Festival and others.

A frequent collaborator with other poets and artists, she co-curated Gelynion, a Welsh Enemies project on collaboration in contemporary poetry in Wales in 2015 and collaborated with Kannada poet Mamta Sagar on the project Interversions, now a book published by Poetrywala. Her poetry has been translated into Arabic, Croatian, Czech, Kannada, Kurdish, Latvian, Mandarin, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish and Welsh. Nia is currently undertaking practice-based research on poetry, performance and ritual at the University of Salford.

‘Bemused, amused, angry, frustrated, erudite, discursive, and always fresh (fresh is one of the words that might define Nia’s poetry) she comes at them from every angle.’ – Mark Waldron

‘Nia Davies quietly dismembers the world around her with a gleeful irreverence and quirky humour. This is poetry full of unexpected twists and turns which both delights and disturbs in equal measures. What a treat to have this substantial collection from one of the most enigmatic new voices in poetry today.’ – Geraldine Monk

 

‘Nia Davies’s poems are sharply attentive to the realm of the ‘inner ear’, a meeting point of external and internal environments. The lines have their own intense music, but instead of approaching song’s recognition and resolution they push towards the unfamiliar. Archaeologies and soundscapes are carefully excavated in language that sparks at every turn, while multiple directions open for the reader and ‘choice is a parallelogram / best made on the slant”.’ —Zoë Skoulding

 

‘Nia Davies writes rich and adventurous poems. Her work feels borderless… In the event that an “I” surfaces in her work, it is defiantly plastic and multivalent.’ – Dai George

Twitter: @niapolly