k.m.r. byford - poetry

I write from queer, unsteady and unlit places, preoccupied with the sticky, intertwined fates of all things.

I have a BA in Classics from Durham University, where I received the Maltby Exhibition Prize for my dissertation about poetic and artistic interpretations of Sappho's work.

I am the recipient of a Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant from the Arts Council, which has supported my first collection, about bats, care, crisis and the reckoning of our mythologies.

My pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, was published in 2021 with ignitionpress, part of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre. Support them by buying a copy from them directly, here.

I was the 2020 winner of the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, judged by Fiona Benson. Read my winning poem, 'Appetit', here.

Other poems of mine were shortlisted for the 2025 Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, and for The London Magazine Poetry Prize in 2024.

I am an alum of the Barbican Young Poets and The Writing Squad and I was in the 2022/23 cohort of The London Library's Emerging Writers Programme.

Read my poems online in bath magg and Propel, and in print with The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, Modern Poetry in Translation (subsequently published online here), Magma and Popshot, and elsewhere.

He Said I Was a Peach

Published in 2021 by ignitionpress

These are breathtaking poems of a strange, deep glamour; their imagery is uncompromising, and their music utterly original. Byford composes on a scale that is entirely her own. She has a preternatural ability to capture other worlds, other Umwelten – Thetis hearing her son’s voice as 'a warm strain / softening the frozen kelp / like piss', or the shuttling dislocations of Arachne – 'weft thin / softning'. These poems return to sites of trauma or eroticism or myth in a way that renders them immediate, dangerous, and unstable; but there is a beautiful act of salvage here. The world is sifted for its stains, blisters and residues, its sensual drives, and the sticky fingers of human longing. Byford is a reckoning, an uncanny and ferocious rising star.

— Fiona Benson

select publications

The Propel Anthology: 2025 (December 2025)

Edited by Helen Mort, Susannah Dickey, Sanah Ahsan and Richard Scott

Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices (Bloomsbury, July 2025)

Edited by Emily Hauser and Helena Taylor

A Midnight Treasury of Macabre and Weird Poems (Rizzoli UK, September 2025)

Edited by Ana Sampson

Propel, Issue 15 (May 2025)

Edited by Sanah Ahsan

The London Magazine | August—September 2024 (sold out)

Edited by Jamie Cameron