Alice Oswald studied Classics at Oxford and then trained as a gardener. She worked in gardens for seven years before publishing her first book of poems, THE THING IN THE GAP-STONE STILE, which won the Forward Prize in 1996. She was writer-in-residence at Dartington Hall from 1996-8 and there wrote her long poem DART, which won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2002. Other collections have won the inaugural Ted Hughes award (WEEDS AND WILDFLOWERS), the Hawthornden prize (A SLEEPWALK ON THE SEVERN) and the Warwick prize (MEMORIAL). In 2009 she won a Cholmondeley award for her contribution to poetry. She was the Oxford Professor of Poetry between 2019 and 2023. She is married with three children and lives in Devon.
In 2016 her collection FALLING AWAKE (Cape Poetry) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2016 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2016, and was the winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2016. In June 2017 she was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize 2017.
Her latest collection, NOBODY, was published by Cape Poetry in September 2019.
GIGANTIC CINEMA, an anthology of writing about the weather, co-edited with Paul Keegan, was published in 2020 by Jonathan Cape and W.W. Norton.