About
Ali Lewis is a writer and academic. He is the author of Absence (Cheerio, February 2024) and Hotel (Verve, 2020). From May 2024 he will be Lecturer in Creative Writing at Exeter University.
He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018, and his poems and short stories have appeared in magazines including The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, Poetry London, Poetry Review, PN Review, and The London Magazine. He has been shortlisted or highly commended in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize, the Ginkgo Prize, the Rialto Nature and Place Prize, the Jane Martin Prize, the PBS National Student Poetry competition, the Pat Kavanagh Award, and the Poetry Book Fair competition.
He frequently collaborates with composers and settings of his work have been performed at Wigmore Hall and the Southbank Centre, and featured on Radio Three and Radio France Musique. His songs include ‘Familiar Objects’, a sequence of poems with semi-improvised music from The Hermes Experiment (shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Award), and ‘Like Words’, the lead single of Héloïse Werner’s album Phrases (Times Classical Album of the Year).
He has an AHRC-funded PhD from Durham, an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, and a first-class degree in Politics from Cambridge, where he received the John Dunn and Precious Pearl Prizes and was a member of the Footlights.
He has worked as a Programme Officer for the Poetry Society, Editorial Manager for the Poetry School, and as Assistant and Associate Editor of Poetry London. He currently teaches for the Poetry School and City Lit.
He was born in Nottingham in 1990 to a mixed Ashkenazi / White British family.
For a full list of publications, see CV. If you’d like to discuss teaching, competition sifting, or editorial work, get in touch.
“Ali Lewis’s Hotel is an exhilarating debut – immediately engaging, surprising and astute, shot through with a powerful sense of narrative matched by a perfectly balanced formal intuition. These poems are rueful, sexy, funny, and draw a rare clarity out of the most complex emotional knots.”
“Witty, playful, and philosophical… he makes humble objects resonate beyond their limits.”