Andy Willoughby
Andrew Robert Willoughby is a poet from Middlesbrough. He grew up in the steel making area of Grangetown and attended catholic schools - St Mary’s in Grangetown, St Peters in South Bank and St Mary’s VI Form College in Saltersgill. He studied English and Anerican literature at Kent University at Canterbury graduating with a First and winning the University’s T.S.Eliot Proze for poetry (now the Valerie Eliot prize). He also won a WB Yeats Scholarship to attend the WB Yeats Summer School where he attended seminal poetry and drama workshops with Professor Seamus Heaney and Professor Katherine Worth.
He has a Masters in Theatre and Film from Sheffield University which he attended with a British Academy studentship. He studied physical and social and political theatre and attended workshops with the former dramaturg of the Berliner ensemble Jorg Mihan and worked closely on productions with the legendary Nigerian poet and playwright Esiaba Irobi and director Brid Andrews which has greatly influenced his dramatic work with community and school groups.
Andy has been going to Finland and working with Finnish poets and musicians since 2000 and due to his and Beagrie’s efforts with Finnish partners an exchange has been running in various forms between south west Finland and North East England from 2002 to the present which played a big part in developing Middlesbrough’s successful T Junction bi-annual International Poetry festival. He is an international board member of Turku Runoviiko, of the Baltica Literra organisation comprising Baltic and Scandinavian poets and of the social poetry organisation Kiila.
Andy has also produced and co-created a number of large scale new drama projects including the new Playwrights Lab at Stockton Arc resulting in the Short Sharp Festival and the Summer Shorts Festival at Redcar Tuned in with Redcar drama lab.
Andy now lives in Saltburn on the North Yorkshire coast with his wife Rebecca.
Andy has been published in numerous anthologies such as Oral : An Anthology of British Performance Poetry (Sceptre 1999) and North-bound (Vane Women 2016). He was Middlesbrough’s official Poet Laureate in The Wrong California (Mudfog Press 2003) and has been published collaboratively with Finnish poet Riina Katajavuori in Peripheries (Ek Zuban 2006) and with Bob Beagrie in Kids ( Mudfog Press 2011) and Sampo:Heading Further North - poems inspired by Kalevala (Red Squirrel Press 2015).
He has two collections with Smokestack books “ Tough “ (Smokestack 2004) and Between Stations (2016). He has also edited several project anthologies with Beagrie for Ek Zuban including IFlesh of the Bear : poems from North East England and South West Finland , Intercity Flow (Ek Zuban 2015) and Breakout:An Anthology of New Writing from The Teesside Scene (Ek Zuban 2013)