Oz Hardwick

Oz Hardwick is a York-based writer, photographer and musician, who has been published extensively worldwide, and has read everywhere from Glastonbury Festival to New York, via countless back rooms of pubs. His prose poetry chapbook 'Learning to Have Lost' (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry. His most recent chapbooks are 'The Lithium Codex' (Clevedon: The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2019), a collection of "powerful, startling, and utterly original" prose poems (Angela Readman), and 'Wolf Planet' (Clevedon: The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020), a 'staggering offering from a bold artist' (Eugen Bacon).

A keen collaborator with other artists, Oz has had work performed by classical musicians in UK concert halls, by flamenco musicians in Italian villas, and with experimental sound and film artists in an Australian cinema. The latest publication from this collaborative ethos is 'Close as Second Skins' (Beaworthy: Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2015), a tanka sequence written with Amina Alyal, which draws West and East, past and present into crystalline poems that glitter and shine long after the book has been closed. This was shortlisted for the 2015 Saboteur Collaborative Work Award.

Oz has edited and co-edited several collections, of which 'The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry' (with Anne Caldwell - Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) is the most recent, and 'The Valley Press Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry (with Miles Salter - Scarborough: Valley Press, 2017) was a National Poetry Day 2017 recommendation.

His performance photographs have been used on album covers by bands including Hawkwind, Solstice, Magic Mushroom Band, Ozric Tentacles & Haze, as well as in magazines and books: over two hundred of his photographs are featured in Martin Popoff's Hawkwind: A Visual Biography (Bedford, Wymer, 2021). He has also exhibited in galleries and had his photographs in a number of academic books and journals.

Oz has played in a number of bands - mainly bass, but also other stringed instruments. Recordings with Sixpenny Wayke & A Tiding of Magpies are featured on compilations 'Hail be You Sovereigns, Lief and Dear' and 'The Forme To The Fynisment Foldes Ful Selden' (Cold Spring, 2013 & 2020). He is also a regular contributor to the music magazine RnR.

By day, Oz is Professor of English and Programme Leader for English and Writing at Leeds Trinity University. In an academic capacity, he has published the monograph, 'English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning' (Boydell, 2011), edited a number of books on the Middle Ages and myth, and written many articles on the Middle Ages and medievalism, along with Creative Writing as an academic discipline.

His one regret in life is that he is not Belgian.