42 British women poets

Shamim Azad is a Bangladeshi-born British bilingual poet, storyteller and writer.

Emma Scarr Booth was a British-born American author. Born in England, she emigrated to the United States as a child. She was the author of three volumes, entitled Karan Kringle's Journal; A Willful Heiress; and Poems. Additionally, she composed numerous songs and instrumental pieces.

Marjorie Boulton was a British author and poet writing in both English and Esperanto. Marjorie Boulton studied English at Somerville College, Oxford where she was taught by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008. She taught English literature in teacher training and as a college principal for 24 years before turning to full-time research and writing. She is a well-known writer in Esperanto. Boulton in her later years was president of two Esperanto organisations, Kat-amikaro and ODES.

Elizabeth Boyd was an English writer and poet who supported her family by writing novels, poetry, a play, and a periodical. She also wrote under the noms de plume Louisa or Eloisa. Boyd is one of three known members of the Shakespeare Ladies Club.

Jean "Binta" Breeze MBE is a Jamaican dub poet and storyteller. She has worked also as a theatre director, choreographer, actor and teacher. She has performed her work around the world, in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, South-East Asia and Africa, and been called "one of the most important, influential performance poets of recent years".

Juanita Casey was a poet, playwright, novelist and artist as well as a horse and zebra trainer and breeder. Her writing celebrates her time in Ireland and the New Forest.

Anne Chamber was an English noblewoman and poet.

Elizabeth Cobbold or Carolina Petty Pasty born Elizabeth Knipe was a British writer and poet.

Mary Colling or Mary Maria Colling was a British poet, domestic servant.

Julia Copus FRSL is a British poet, radio dramatist and children's writer.

Anne Ross Cousin was a British poet, musician and songwriter. She was a student of John Muir Wood and later became a popular writer of hymns, most especially "The Sands Of Time Are Sinking", while travelling with her minister husband from 1854 to 1878. Many of her hymns were widely used throughout Great Britain during the mid-to late 19th century. One of her sons, John William Cousin, was a prominent writer and editor of A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature.

Imtiaz Dharker is a British poet, artist and video film maker. She has won the Queen’s Gold Medal for her English poetry and was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University from January 2020. In 2019 she was considered for the position of Poet Laureate following the tenure of Carol Ann Duffy, but withdrew herself from contention in order, as she stated, to maintain focus on her writing.“I had to weigh the privacy I need to write poems against the demands of a public role. The poems won,” said Dharker. For many Dharker is seen as one of Britain's most inspirational contemporary poets. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011. In the same year, she received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. In 2016 she received an Honorary Doctorate from SOAS University of London.

Valentine Dobrée (1894–1974) was a visual artist, novelist and poet.

Helen Selina Blackwood, Baroness Dufferin and Claneboye, later Countess of Gifford, was a British songwriter, composer, poet, and author. Admired for her wit and literary talents, she was a well-known figure in London society of the mid-19th century.

Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019. She is the first woman, the first Scottish-born poet and the first known LGBT poet to hold the position.

Elizabeth Anna Hart, née Smedley, also known as Fanny Wheeler Hart (1822–1890) was a British poet and novelist born in London. She was a cousin of Lewis Carroll's through her aunt, Lucy Dodgson née Hume, who was Carroll's grandmother. Hart wrote children's poetry with her sister Menella Bute Smedley as well as novels, including Mrs. Jerningham's Journal and The Runaway.

Linda France is a British poet, writer and editor. She has published seven full-length poetry collections, a number of pamphlets, and was editor of the influential anthology, Sixty Women Poets. France is the author of The Toast of the Kit-Cat Club, a verse biography of the eighteenth-century traveler and social rebel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She has won numerous awards and fellowships, including the National Poetry Competition in 2013.

Karen Gershon, born Kaethe Loewenthal (1923–1993) was a German-born British writer and poet. She escaped to Britain in December 1938.

Pippa Goldschmidt is a British fiction writer, based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

M. A. Griffiths (1947–2009) was a British poet who developed an international following on the Internet.

Mary Leman Grimstone was a British poet and novelist. She wrote about Women's rights and she wrote one of the first Australian novels, ''Louise Egerton''.

Violet Spiller Hay was a Christian Science teacher and hymnist. She was one of the first teachers of Christian Science in the United Kingdom and the religion's first teacher in South Africa.

Rose Ellen Hendriks who became Rose Ellen Temple was an ambitious British novelist and poet. Her history is revealed by books that describe a novelist with a very similar life story who read famous authors including "Rose Ellen Hendriks".

Sarah Hoare (1777–1856) was a British author and artist known for her scientific poetry.

Noor-un-Nissa Inayat Khan, GC, also known as Nora Inayat-Khan and Nora Baker, was a British spy in World War II who served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Catherine Jemmat was an English author who published in The Gentleman's Magazine and produced two collections of her own.

Sylvia Kantaris is a British poet, based in Cornwall, who has published seven collections of poetry and two collections in collaboration. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into various languages, including Italian, Japanese and Finnish.

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget. She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music, and travel.

Zion Lights is a British author and activist known for her environmental work and science communication. She is UK director of Environmental Progress. She has been a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (XR) UK on TV and radio, and founded and edited XR's Hourglass newspaper. She has written for The Huffington Post, authored the evidence-based nonfiction book The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting, and given a TEDx talk.

Mina Loy was a British-born artist, writer, poet, playwright, novelist, painter, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, and Yvor Winters, among others. As stated by Nicholas Fox Weber in the New York Times, "This brave soul had the courage and wit to be original. Mina Loy may never be more than a vaguely familiar name, a passing satellite, but at least she sparkled from an orbit of her own choosing."

Sarah Martin was a prison visitor and philanthropist. She was born at Great Yarmouth; and lived in nearby Caister. She earned her living by dressmaking, and devoted much of her time amongst criminals in the Tolhouse Gaol in Great Yarmouth.

(Helen) Hope Mirrlees was a British translator, poet and novelist. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, a fantasy novel and influential classic, and for Paris: A Poem, a modernist poem that critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition."

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Eleanor K. Rees is a British poet.

Rosie Garland is a British novelist, poet and singer with post-punk band The March Violets.

Jane Satterfield is a British-American poet, essayist, editor, and professor. She is the recipient of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in poetry.

Annie Tinsley, born Annie Turner, was a British novelist and poet. She used the name Mrs Charles Tinsley.

Anna Jane Vardill became Anna Niven and wrote as "V" was a British poet. She created a mystery when she published a sequel to one of Coleridge's poems before he had published his work. It was claimed that Vardill's poem was not hers but later evidence discovered after her death that this was her poem. There is a Vardill Society that is gathering her forty years of publications together.

Annie Vivanti Chartres, also known as Anita Vivanti or Anita Vivanti Chartres, was a British-born Italian writer.

Elizabeth Jane Weston. Elizabeth was an English-Czech poet, known for her Neo-Latin poetry. She had the unusual distinction for a woman of the time of having her poetry published.

Helen Maria Williams was a British novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. A religious dissenter, she was a supporter of abolitionism and of the ideals of the French Revolution; she was imprisoned in Paris during the Reign of Terror, but nonetheless spent much of the rest of her life in France.

Pamela Adelaide Genevieve Wyndham Glenconner Grey, later Lady Glenconner, Viscountess Grey of Fallodon was an English writer. The wife of Edward Tennant, 1st Baron Glenconner, and later of Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, she is one of the Wyndham Sisters by John Singer Sargent which were at the centre of the cultural and political life of their time. Like their parents, they were part of The Souls.