Louise Warren was born in Bridport, Dorset and grew up in the West Country. She moved to London in 1984 to study community theatre arts at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama. After graduating she worked in theatre as a playwright, co-forming the visual theatre company Working Parts with directors Sue Buckmaster and Steve Tiplady and going on to work for companies including The Little Angel Theatre, Theatre-Rites, Scarlet Theatre, and Immediate Theatre.
Her first poetry book, A Child’s Last Picture Book of the Zoo, was published in 2012 and has been followed by two pamphlets. In the Scullery with John Keats was published by Cinnamon Press in 2016 and John Dust by V. Press in 2019.
Louise has been widely published in magazines including Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Poetry Wales, and Stand.
She has been placed in a number of poetry competitions and in 2018 she won the Prole Laurate Poetry Prize for her poem The Marshes which appears in her latest pamphlet John Dust.
Her poetry is inspired by the natural and unnatural world, by strangeness, and the interior life of things. Her work in theatre (especially visual theatre and puppetry) also informs her work often animating the inanimate.
Her themes run from the mythological Somerset landscape, through to churchyards, houses, the life of a gall wasp, and a marionette. She also writes about her memories of people and place, although always though the gaze of the unexpected and the slant.
Louise Warren, poet 