HUBBARD, Sue
At various times an antique dealer and a small holder, Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, fiction writer and freelance art critic. Her work explores both the dark and the light within human experience. Through an evocation of the perceived and actual world and the careful attention to the detail of things – be it art or nature, the incidental or the everyday – she attempts to give voice to our deepest emotions. Her subjects are those of love, loss and memory. She writes of our vulnerabilities, so often concealed, and through their disclosure, suggests the possibility of renewal.
A Hawthornden Fellow, she was twice winner of the London Writers competition and held the residency as the Poetry Society’s first-ever Public Art Poet, during which she created a number of site-specific poems for a visual arts project in Birmingham’s jewellery quarter. 
Commissioned by the Arts Council and the British Film Institute she was responsible for London’s biggest art poem that leads from Waterloo to the IMAX cinema. She has also been writer-in-residence at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill during ArchiTEXT week.
Her first poetry collection, Everything Begins with the Skin, was published in 1994 (Enitharmon) and a number of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 2000 (Carcanet). Of her most recent collection, Ghost Station (Salt Publishing, 2004), John Burnside wrote: “Ghost Station is a marvellous book. Whether she is writing about art, love or memory, Sue Hubbard pays attention to the important things: the details, the incidentals, the faraway, the everyday, all the things we are inclined to neglect which make up the real fabric of our daily lives.” Many of her poems have been anthologised, most recently in A Room to Live In (Salt) and Women’s Work (Seren)
In 2000 she published her first novel, Depth of Field, which John Berger called: “Highly evocative…having the rare quality, not of a text, but of a place. It surrounds its readers and waits until they see in the dark to make their own discoveries.” Elaine Feinstein added: “This is a first novel by a writer of genuine talent. Sue Hubbard’s originality lies in the gritty detail of the imaged past she pursues among the realities of a contemporary East End. This gives a remarkable freshness to her theme of a lost Jewish identity underlying Hannah’s moving story.”
Ruth Fainlight described her book of short stories, Rothko’s Red, published in Autumn 2008 as “a dazzling collection“.
Sue Hubbard is a regular contributor to The Independent and The New Statesman where she writes on contemporary art. She has contributed to a wide range of publications including The Independent on Sunday, The Guardian, Art Review, Contemporary, Tate, Third Text, Art World and The RA Magazine, and has written catalogue essays on many leading artists.
Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio and she has twice been awarded residencies at Yaddo, in up state New York, and in 2006 was awarded a major Arts Council Literary Award.