Olivia McCannon

Welcome! This website is currently under reconstruction.

Please contact me at oliviamccannon [at] btinternet.com if you would like to view samples of recent and past work. A short biography appears below.

I am a writer, researcher and translator of poetry.

My work explores the ecological and transformational from within languages and literatures, valorising alternative, living interactions through sensory and experimental practice.

Current projects include my speculative “future-past inventory” of poem-artefacts The Lives of Z, translations of the Québécoise eco-feminist poet Louky Bersianik (1930–2011), and a poem-novel about the Greenham Common Peace Camp.

My AHRC-funded doctoral research (Northern Bridge/Newcastle University 2023) offers the practice of “living translation” as part of an ‘Anthropocene’ toolkit. 

Earlier work is published by Penguin, Carcanet and Bloodaxe and widely in literary and academic journals. My poetry collection Exactly My Own Length was awarded the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize.

I have performed, chaired events and led reading groups and writing workshops at literary festivals, schools and universities.

I spent nine years in France, in Montpellier and Belleville, Paris, and live in London with my husband and two children.