I am a poet interested in misogyny, queer corporeality, chronic illness and post-trauma. I studied Classics at Durham University.
I am the recipient of a Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant from the Arts Council, which has supported my first collection, about bats.
My pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, was published in 2021 with ignitionpress, part of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre. Get your copy here.
I was the 2020 winner of the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, judged by Fiona Benson. Read my winning poem, 'Appetit', here.
My work was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize in 2025 and for The London Magazine Poetry Prize in 2024.
I was in the 2022/23 cohort of The London Library's Emerging Writers Programme, and am an alum of the Barbican Young Poets and the Writing Squad.
My poems have been published 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, among others.
A commission for the Barbican Gallery's exhibition 'Lee Krasner: Living Colour'. Photo: Catarina Rodrigues
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
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
Editor Zoë Brigley. Contributing editors Fahad Al-Amoudi and Des Mannay. Included as part of poems curated by Fahad Al-Amoudi.
Magma 88: Underworld (sold out)
Edited by Leo Boix, Ella Duffy and Kate Simpson
Modern Poetry in Translation | Origins of the Fire Emoji: Focus on Dead [Women] Poets (issue available online)
Guest-edited by the Dead [Women] Poets Society
She is Fierce: brave, bold and beautiful poems by women (Macmillan, 2020)
Edited by Ana Sampson
Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe Books, 2015)
Edited by the Raving Beauties
links to other work:
