My poem ‘Museum Volunteer’ has been re-published, this time by Candlestick Press in their lovely pamphlet Ten Poems About Museums: https://www.candlestickpress.co.uk/pamphlet/ten-poems-about-museums/

I have an article, ‘Writing Oneself Home’, published here, which arose out of a panel discussion in which I participated in spring 2023.

I also have a chapter in Chris Brown and Graham Handscomb’s book, The Ideas-Informed Society: Why We Need It and How to Make It Happen, published by Emerald Publishing in 2023. My chapter is called ‘A little conceptual housekeeping: ideas and their contexts’: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ideas-Informed-Society-Need-Make-Happen-ebook/dp/B0C413SY5D

Two Rivers Press have re-issued Christina the Astonishing, which Jane Draycott and I co-wrote back in the 1990s – the beautifully re-designed edition has some newly-discovered artwork by Peter Hay. Find out more here.

My full collection, This Thing of Blood & Love, came out in February 2022 from Two Rivers Press. The journal Raceme recently carried a review of the book that called the title poem (which was inspired by a response to Cy Twombly’s sketch ‘Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus’) ‘powerful and highly accomplished’, ‘a storm in twenty-two lines… which seems to me to manage in language what Twombly and others of the mid-late twentieth century did in paint… Saunders delves under the skin and into the heart.’

I am very touched that Professor Clementina Mihăilescu of Sibiu University, Romania, has produced a book, An Interdisciplinary Approach to Lesley Saunders’ Poetry, in which she adopts an approach using ‘the latest tendencies in criticism, sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis’, which include Jung’s archetypes, Bakhtin’s chronotypes and Bachelard’s aesthetic theory.

I was delighted to be awarded third prize in the 2022 Rialto RSPB poetry competition for my poem ‘Ghosts’ and first prize in the Winchester Poetry Festival prize last autumn for my poem ‘The Starlings’ – both poems are elegies for the grievous loss of wildlife in our islands.

In 2021, I took part in an online conversation with Yann Martell, ‘The Art of Fragments’, about how the fragments of text and artefact have shaped and informed our work; watch here.

My poetry collection, Days of Wonder, created in collaboration with artist Rebecca Swainston during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, was launched on 6 October last year. For Rebecca’s startling and beautiful work, visit her website here.