Sue Finch is the author of two poetry collections: Magnifying Glass (2020), and Welcome to the Museum of a Life (2024). Sue’s poetry is widely published. She has recorded her work for iamb and has been featured on the poetry podcasts Eat the Storms and A Thousand Shades of Green . She loves the coast, peculiar things, and the scent of ice-cream freezers. Vortex Over Wave, Sue’s coffee table book, was published in 2023 and features a selection of #ElasticBandPhotos and poems for the full moon.
Sue is a regular participant in Top Tweet Tuesday, and was delighted that her poem And if the Soul is Connected to the Body was shortlisted for the ‘Dai Fry Award’ in 2022 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has twice been nominated for ‘Best of the Net’ with Her Dress and I Hate You.
Sue lives with her wife in North Wales. She says: “I love setting words down on a page and I enjoy seeing where a line or a thought can take me. I have a writing desk in the corner of the lounge where there is room to tuck away into the quiet world of writing. My wife, Kath, is often invited to ‘Poetry Corner’ (a chair in our lounge) to be the first audience and critical listener for the drafts I am working on.”
There is a rich element of the confessional to Sue’s work, and she is also influenced by folk tales, dreams, and her rich imagination.
The first thirty years of Sue’s professional life were in education, working her way from class teacher to head in a range of primary schools. Throughout this time Sue wrote poetry and encouraged others to write. She organised ‘Poetry Supper’ evenings in her last school where books of poetry written by pupils and staff were launched and shared with families. Sue believes everyone has an element of the poetic inside them which they can tap into with the right inspiration and encouragement.
Sue is an accredited coach and enjoys using elements of poetry in her coaching work.
What people say about Sue’s poetry:
“Sue Finch’s voice is both steady and questioning as she sets down the archive of her life museum and invites you to lean in for a closer look. Each exhibit feels like a very personal and off-kilter chronicle of a collective memory where wolves and silence stand with their backs to the corners of the theatrical space of a museum cabinet in which Smurfs and giraffes have walk-on parts.” Helen Ivory.
Sue’s poems “have the ability both to beguile and shock you with their humour, tenderness and darkness”. Georgi Gill.
“To read Suzanne is to be transported to other worlds, not just the gorgeous yet unsettling lands of the Hare Mother, the Red Shoes or a traumatised Rapunzel, but to worlds in which the everyday is transformed into the stuff of myth and legend.” Anna Saunders.
Sue Finch 