Penelope Shuttle

Penelope Shuttle
Born	(1947-05-12) 12 May 1947 Staines, Middlesex, England
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	English
Notable awards	Cholmondeley Award (2007)
Spouse	Peter Redgrove (died 2003)
Children	1

Penelope Shuttle (born 12 May 1947) is an English poet and author. She has published fifteen volumes of poetry, plus two selected volumes, and six works of fiction. She has won the Eric Gregory Award and the Cholmondeley Award and has been shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is also known for The Wise Wound, a non-fictional work on menstruation, which she wrote with her late husband Peter Redgrove.

Life

Born in Staines, Middlesex, Shuttle left school at 17. She has lived in Falmouth, Cornwall since 1970. She married the poet Peter Redgrove (1932–2003) and they have a daughter, Zoe.

Shuttle is a founder member of the Falmouth Poetry Group, founded in 1972. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, and a tutor for the Poetry School.

Career

Shuttle wrote her first novel at the age of 20. She published her debut, the novella, An Excusable Vengeance, in 1967. She has since published five more novellas and novels, as well as an omnibus collection.

Shuttle is better known for her poetry, having published fifteen original volumes and two selected volumes. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1974. Her first selected volume was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 1998. Her ninth volume, Redgrove's Wife, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2007 Cholmondeley Award. Sandgrain and Hourglass was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2010. Her collection Lyonesse was longlisted for the 2022 Laurel Prize, an award for environmental or nature poetry established by Simon Armitage.

The Wise Wound

In 1978, Shuttle and her husband Peter Redgrove published a non-fiction book about menstruation, The Wise Wound.

The Victor Gollancz Ltd publishers file for The Wise Wound is held in University College Cork Library as the Shuttle-Redgrove Collection. This collection was acquired in May 2019 and consists of correspondences, contemporary reviews of The Wise Wound and letters from various individuals praising the work, including the poets Ted Hughes and D.M. Thomas.

Shuttle and Redgrove published a sequel, Alchemy for Women, in 1995.

Awards

• 1974 Eric Gregory Award
• Selected Poems (OUP, 1998) Poetry Book Society Recommendation
• 2007 Cholmondeley Award
• Sandgrain and Hourglass (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) Poetry Book Society Recommendation

External links

• "The Wolf Interview: Penelope Shuttle", James Byrne, The Wolf, 10
• "Penelope Shuttle", The Poetry Archive
• "Penelope Shuttle", The British council
• "Unsent: New and Selected Poems 1980-2012 by Penelope Shuttle - review", Sean O'Brien, The Guardian, 28 December 2012