Quick Facts
Biography
Liz (Elizabeth) Lefroy (born 9 December 1964) is a British poet.
Poetry
Lefroy's first publication was Pretending the Weather (2011) followed by The Gathering (2012), a meditation on the Anglican liturgy set to music by Brian Evans. It premiered at the 2012 St Chad's Music Festival, Shrewsbury.
Her most recent collection is Mending the Ordinary (2014). Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, said of it, "Liz Lefroy’s first slim pamphlet is a triumph. These delicately told human moments sound with the perfect pitch of a true poet. Using not a word too many, she lets us read between the lines.”
Her poems have also appeared in Shoestring, Mslexia, Magma and The Frogmore Papers. Ink, Sweat and Tears, Writers’ Hub Wenlock Poetry Anthologies 2013, 2015 and 2016 The Writing Room, The Emergency Poet Anthology edited by Deborah Alma (2015), and the Picador Anthology celebrating independent bookshops: Off the Shelf - A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse, edited by Carol Ann Duffy (2016)
Other collaborations include performances of Sweet Thunder: A Show in Three Layers, with Lucy Aphramor and Amy Godfrey. Its tour included the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 and 2015, Shrewsbury, Coventry and Manchester. She wrote poems to accompany the photographs of Alex Ramsay's OS for the Presteigne Festival (2014). She was part of the Maligned Species project (2015-16 Fair Acre Press http://fairacrepress.co.uk/projects/)
Events and appearances
In 2012 she founded Poetry at the Coffeehouse, a monthly event in Shrewsbury, in which local and national poets perform their work. This outgrew its venue in 2014 and is now at Eat Up, also in Shrewsbury on the first Thursday of every month. Guest poets have included Andrew McMillan, Fred D,Aguiar, Helen Ivory, Martin Figura, Adam Horovitz, Lucy English, Rosie Shepperd, Katrina Naomi, Matthew Stewart and Philip Gross.
She appears regularly on BBC Radio Shropshire as a guest of Ryan Kennedy, reading poetry and highlighting forthcoming poetry events in and around Shropshire.
She featured at a poetry reading in November 2014 in Shrewsbury with Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke. was curator of the Poetry Busk at the Wenlock Poetry Festival 2015 and 2016 where she has also given readings alongside James Sheard, Kathleen Jamie, Andrew McMillan and Don Paterson.
Awards
In 2011 she won the first Roy Fisher Prize, an award for new work in poetry which is endowed by Carol Ann Duffy.
She was highly commended in the Bridport Poetry Prize 2015.
Work
Lefroy has worked at Glyndŵr University, Wrexham, an educational institution in North Wales, since 2006 and is now programme leader in social work. Prior to this she worked in Edinburgh as a lecturer in an FE (further education) college and an education officer in local authority day services for people with learning disabilities. After moving to Shropshire she worked first for the local authority and then to the voluntary sector where she managed a staff team supporting people with visual impairments and complex needs.
Education
She was educated at South Hampstead High School, London and St Mary's College Durham University and thereafter did post-graduate degrees first in Psychology and then Creative Writing at Keele. She also has a PGCE from Bristol University.