ABOUT ME

Adam Horovitz is a poet, journalist and editor. He was born in 1971 in London and raised in Slad, Gloucestershire. He has written poetry since childhood but started to take it seriously in his early 20s. He took part in the inaugural Days of Poetry and Wine Festival in Slovenia in 1996, and was one of the first influx of Versopolis poets chosen by Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2015. He has collaborated with numerous musicians, including Becky Dellow, Josef Reeve and Cerys Matthews.

Since poetry can a considerable time to pay, he has supported himself over the years with a number of jobs, including editorial work for the Glastonbury Festival website, as arts editor for the Stroud News and Journal, ghostwriting, copy writing for a PR company, sheep dipping, bar work and more, but has been working mostly as a writer since 2016.

“Tactful and tactile, [Horovitz] has his own true voice, speaking his occasionally disturbing material with a light yet firm touch.” 

Anthony Rudolf, The Jewish Quarterly, on Next Year in Jerusalem.

Books

I released my self-published first pamphlet, Next Year in Jerusalem, in 2004. Another pamphlet, The Great Unlearning, was published in 2009. My first full collection of poetry, Turning, was published by Headland in 2011. My memoir of growing up in 1970s and 80s Cider with Rosie country, A Thousand Laurie Lees, was published by the History Press in 2014. I released a pamphlet of poems written as the Stroud Museum in the Park’s first poet in residence, Waiting for the Flame (Yew Tree Press) in November 2014 and a pamphlet, Wattle and Daub, during my Herefordshire residency. My next full book, written as the Pasture for Life poet in residence, was The Soil Never Sleeps (Palewell, 2018 - plus an extended seconded edition in 2019). My most recent book is Love and Other Fairy Tales (Indigo Dreams, 2021)

“Horovitz writes with great delicacy about relationships and the natural world, sometimes baldly countered with an almost gothic sense of unresolved psychic violence”

Martyn Crucefix, Poetry London, on Turning

Adventures in audio

I have experimented with audio and collaborated with musicians for years, an interest that formed in the cradle, listening to my father’s collaborations with musicians such as Stan Tracey and Lol Coxhill.

I have performed live with fiddle player Becky Dellow numerous times, performing two poetry and music shows - The Apple’s Rounded World, a century of poetry and music from the Slad Valley, and a show based on my book The Soil Never Sleeps. We also collaborated on The Thunder Mutters, a podcast celebrating the poetry and music of John Clare.

I released Little Metropolis, an album of poetry and music that takes a psycho-geographic tour of my childhood hometown of Stroud, with Josef Reeve in 2015, and I have a poem on the Cerys Matthews and Hidden Orchestra album We Come From the Sun (Decca, 2021), alongside Liz Berry, Lemn Sissay and more.

In 2022, I was commissioned by musician and composer Chris Cundy to write 15 poems for his Resonance FM series Archaeology of the Ear, exploring neolithic Britain. The poems were written to be accompanied by his music, and punctuated the five part documentary series, illustrating and expanding upon the points raised in the interviews.

Residencies

I was the poet in residence for: Borkowski PR’s website from 2005 to 2007 (writing satirical poems about ‘celebrities, politicians and other scoundrels’); Glastonbury Festival’s official website in 2009; Stroud’s Museum in the Park during the Laurie Lee centenary in 2014; the county of Herefordshire between 2015 and 2016; and for Pasture for Life between 2016 and 2019. I was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012.

“Horovitz notes the seasonal whims of flora and fauna with the eye of a modern Richard Jeffries…”

Michael Caines, The TLS, on A Thousand Laurie Lees.

Judging

I was a judge for the Manchester Poetry Prize and the inaugural Bare Fiction poetry prize in 2014 and have judged various competitions since, including the first two years of the Laurie Lee prize, founded by Katie Fforde with the Stroud Book Festival.

Other stuff

I represented the UK at the first Days of Poetry and Wine festival in Slovenia in 1996, and was chosen as one of the first wave of Versopolis poets by Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2015. With Versopolis, I have travelled to various festivals across Europe and had my poetry translated into Slovakian, Ukranian, Spanish, and Croatian, as well as into French and German.

My poetry has appeared in a number of magazines, including Acumen, Ambit, Tears in the Fence, SAW, Tellus, Fourth World Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Hand + Star, Bare Fiction, Verse Kraken and New Departures. He has also been published in a number of anthologies, including The Orange Dove of Fiji(Hutchinson, 1989), The Bristol Slam Anthology (Pimps of the Alphabet, 1997), Oral(Sceptre, 1999), Asking a Shadow to Dance (Oxfam DVD, 2009), Split Screen (Red Squirrel, 2011),  1914: Poetry Remembers (Faber, 2013), The Poetry of Sex (Penguin, 2014) and Double Bill (Red Squirrel, 2014).