William Oxley

William Oxley is an English poet and philosopher. Born in Manchester, Oxley's poems have been widely published throughout the world, in magazines and journals as diverse as The New York Times and The Formalist (USA), The Scotsman, New Statesman, Te London Magazine, Stand, The Independent, The Spectator and The Observer. Following the publication of a number of his works on the Continent in the 1980s and 1990s, Oxley was dubbed one of Britain's first Europoets.{Vitalism and Celebration. Salzburg 1987. Salzburg University Press. Preface, p.7} He has read his work on UK and European radio and is the only British poet to have read in Shangri-la, Nepal. He published his first volume of poetry fifty years ago in 1967, and his latest volume in 2015. In between he has published thirty-one poetry publications plus volumes of autobiography, literary criticism and philosophy.

A former member of the General Council of the Poetry Society, he is interviews editor of Acumen magazine and co-founder of the Torbay Poetry Festival. He co-edited the newsletter of the Long Poem Group for several years, as its founder. He was Millennium Year poet-in-residence for Torbay in Devon. A limited edition print employing lines from his epic, A Map of Time, was chosen by the Dept. of Cartography, University of Wisconsin to use, with appropriate illustration, in their Annual Broadsheet for 2002. Another of his long poems, Over the Hills of Hampstead, was awarded first prize by the on-line long poem magazine, Echoes of Gilgamesh. In 2008 he received the Torbay ArtsBase Award for Literature.