Sue Hubbard
Art Critic, Poet, Novelist and Broadcaster
Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, novelist, award-winning poet, lecturer and broadcaster.
Her poems have been read on Radio 3 and Radio 4 and she has contributed to many arts programmes including Kaleidoscope, Poetry Please, Night Waves and The Verb.
Poetry: The Forgetting and Remembering of Air published by Salt Publishing.
Direct, muscular, compassionate and brave. This is a poet who is not afraid of the authentic and the real.
“There is nothing safely aesthetic about these poems, beautifully observed though they frequently are. The watching intelligence reaches so far into the places, situations or works of art that it nearly forgets itself, and maybe desires to. The central block of poems on the tragic deaths of women signal that danger, and make it all the more of an achievement when the closing poems journey to the edge of the Atlantic, almost beyond comfort or habitable land, and come back with a final, hard-won ‘...yes’”
Philip Gross
“'There are two kinds of islands' begins the poem, Dreaming of Islands, 'those born of erasure and fracture'. From the 'river's dark skin' at Bow Creek to Yves Klein, from St Ives to Prussian Blue; from Cliff and Elvis to Charing Cross, from Dora Carrington to Diane Arbus, Sue Hubbard locates places and people with a lyrical precision of voice, following those erasures and fractures to a 'fragile yes'. The poems surge with a natural force breathing the world 'into and out of itself'. A mixture of nature and art, this is an impressive book.”
George Szirtes
Twice winner of the London Writers' competition and a Hawthornden Fellow, she was the Poetry Society's first-ever Public Art Poet commissioned by the Arts Council and the BFI to create London's biggest art poem that leads from Waterloo to the IMAX. Her books of poetry include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon 1994). A selection of poems in Oxford Poets 2000 (Carcanet). Ghost Station (Salt Publishing 2004) and The Idea of Islands (Occasional Press 2010). Her work has also appeared in a number of prestigious anthologies and literary magazines including: Encounter, Acumen, Ambit, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, London Magazine, The Independent, The Observer and The Irish Times.
Prose: Sue Hubbard's, new novel Girl in White published by Cinnanon Press.
In art one is usually totally alone with oneself.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Paris, 18 November 1906
"Beautifully written and wholly knowledgeable – Girl in White is a triumph of literary and artistic understanding, a tour du force: masterly, moving. Hubbard goes where few dare go, and succeeds. You are the less for not reading it."
Fay Weldon
“Imagine a chest of drawers – unopened for a hundred years. Inside small garments carefully folded. A woman today opens the drawers, unfolds what she finds and, as she does so, the garments become stories. The chest of drawers belonged to the painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) … (and contain) the secrets of some exceptional, very lonely paintings, which had a considerable influence on “modern” German art … those intimate folds become interstices of History, beyond any notion of what is modern or not. I recommend this haunting book.”
John Berger
Depth of Field, her first novel, was published in 2000 by Dewi Lewis. Her short stories, Rothko's Red, were published by Salt in 2008. Her selected art writings, Adventures in Art, were published by Damien Hirst's Other Criteria in 2010.
Art: Sue Hubbard has contributed regularly to a wide range of publications including Time Out, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, and The New Statesman. She has also written for The Times and The Guardian and numerous art magazines such as Apollo, Tate, Irish Art Review, NY Arts Magazine and the RA magazine. She is the London correspondent for the Los Angeles based contemporary art magazine, Artillery and writes a regular column for www.3quarksdaily.com.
Laura Ford
Days of Judgement
Roche Court Sculpture Park
Sue Hubbard is available for talks, broadcasts, lectures and readings. She can also be contacted for catalogue essays, artist's talks and interviews.
Images maybe subject to copyright
