Lydia Unsworth is a contemporary British poet currently studying for a PhD at the Centre for Place Writing, MMU. Her research explores kinship with post-industrial architecture, while her poetry is dense, lyrical, hybrid, colloquial, and experimental. Rooted in place, her work examines how landscapes affect our personalities, memories, and habits. Using walking and travel as creative methodologies, she explores urban environments and the relationships we form with their structures, capturing everyday details of the contemporary city and the subtle emotional, physical, and social forces that shape daily experience. She’s particularly interested in towns and regions that are going through processes of post-industrial decline and in how the pressures and movements of capitalism transform landscapes and communities.
Lydia has seven poetry collections, the latest of which are Stay Awhile (Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and This Now Extends to My Daughter (Blue Diode Press), both published in 2026. She has work published in many journals and anthologies in the UK and internationally and recently had her first academic paper published in the “Poetics of Place” issue of Writing Place. She regularly performs throughout Greater Manchester and the UK, and has read her work on the BBC and at VERSeFEST International Poetry Festival in Ottawa, Canada.
Lydia will be in residence at Sweeney’s Bothy in November 2026. On Eigg, she will focus on walking the island and writing memories of the urban into the embodied rural landscape.
