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Matt Howard was born in Norfolk in 1978. He is a poet and environmentalist who worked in various roles for the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) for more than a decade. His debut collection Gall was published by The Rialto in 2018, winning the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection in 2020 and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize. His second book-length collection, Broadlands, is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Matt co-founded The RSPB and The Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition in 2011 and was co-editor of Magma 72 The Climate Change Issue. He has been poet in residence for both the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and the Wordsworth Trust. He was the Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds in 2021-23.
Matt Howard brings a naturalist's precise eye to bear on the reedbeds and ""fen stink"" of his native Norfolk. The world that emerges from his marvellous poems does so like a dragon fly from its larval case - strange, fresh, intensely vulnerable. His deep-rooted knowledge of this part of the world lights up poem after poem like the stand of yellow iris he describes in a ""manky"" stretch of the River Yare. These are poems of hard-won rapture – I came away from reading them grateful for their insights and full of “a new sense of things”. -- Esther Morgan Matt Howard knows his subjects intimately, and has a gift for illuminating the most fragile and precarious among them, such as the fen raft spider and the ‘niche and otherness’ of its mating rituals. All human life is part of the same fabric, and these poems shine with insight into our loves and griefs, our capacity for cruelty and joy. In spite of everything, that sense of true belonging in the world is felt “in every part of me, singing"". -- Jean Sprackland Some creatures in Broadlands most likely have never been taken into poetry before. Little local lives are here everywhere present – lives knelt to and felt under fingertips – the eggs of a wren hidden in a leaf-dome nest in a bramble tangle. Matt Howard’s way of seeing, and his plain and yet charged writing of his attentiveness, yields poems that are proof – the finest I’ve seen recently – that poets might be the best nature-writers of our times. Matt Howard’s poems know that nature’s own writing – how a wren lives, say – will never be the same as our writing of nature. The wonder-soaked seeing and lovable cautious modesty of this collection is highly intelligent as to the gap between nature and nature-writing, but its poems make that same gap narrower than it is in almost any other comparable contemporary book. -- Tim Dee
