PALEWELL PRESS

Kelly Davis was born in London, studied English Literature at Oxford, and worked for Penguin, Longman and BBC Books in the 1980s. She moved to Maryport, West Cumbria, in 1989, where she works from home as a freelance editor and helps run a refugee support group.

Her poems have been widely anthologised and published in magazines, including Mslexia, Magma, The Journal and London Grip. She won a Magma subscribers’ competition in 2018 and came second in the 2021 Borderlines Poetry Competition. She has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award three times and she appears in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021 anthology (Black Spring Press). In 2021 she was longlisted for the Erbacce Prize for Poetry and selected for a series of workshops with Kim Moore for Emerging Northwest Poets. She is the North Cumbria Stanza Group rep and takes part in poetry events and open mics around Cumbria. She collaborated with Kerry Darbishire on their joint poetry pamphlet Glory Days; (Hen Run, Grey Hen Press, 2021). https://www.kellydavis.co.uk/glory-days

In 2023 she was shortlisted for the Plough Poetry Prize and commended in the Poetry Society Stanza competition on the theme of refuge. Her debut solo collection, The Lost Art of Ironing, was published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2024: https://www.kellydavis.co.uk/the-lost-art-of-ironing

In 2024, together with Caroline Stockford, Kelly co-edited Words That Walk Through Walls, an anthology of poetry written to and with İlhan Sami Çomak, one of Turkey's longest-serving prisoners of conscience

In June 2026, Palewell Press will be publishing Kelly's pamphlet collection Portrait of My Father as a Snail, poems on her relationship with her reclusive father

For more information, please visit https://www.kellydavis.co.uk