Kim was born in Leicester and now lives in Cumbria. Her first pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, and went on to be shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award and the Lakeland Book of the Year. Her first full length collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) is currently shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her first non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me was published by Smith/Doorstop in March 2022.
She won an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2015. She won the 2020 Ledbury Poetry Competition and was placed third in the 2021 Mslexia Poetry Competition.
Her work has been translated into many languages as part of the Versopolis project and she was a judge for the 2018 National Poetry Competition and the 2020 Forward Prizes.
She was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Bursary in 2016 to carry out PhD research at Manchester Metropolitan University, and completed her doctorate in ‘Poetry and Everyday Sexism’ at in March 2020. She now works as a Creative Writing Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.
She is the co-director of Kendal Poetry Festival and hosts a monthly reading series for Wordsworth Grasmere as well as running regular writing workshops for young people and adults.
She is a keen runner and plays trumpet in a ten piece soul band and flugel in a local brass band.
See her website at https://www.kimmoorepoet.co.uk/
Examples from her collection All The Men I Never Married
All the Men I Never Married No.17
This is not love. We are not speaking of love.
We are singing of Hardy: Woman much missed,
how you call to me, call to me – we are speaking
only of this. Outside I shout the whole thing
into the wind. There is darkness between us,
there is the ocean. My lips are moving
but nothing is heard. This is not love but it is
something like it. Here we are with the loyalty
of clouds. We are drifting, two boats on the water.
You have the wild in you, little wolf.
This is what happens when the body is a boat
and the heart is high and bright as a lantern.
All the Men I Never Married No.20
When he tells me I’m not allowed to play with cars
because I’m a girl, I bring his arm up to my mouth
and bite. I’m sent to the Wendy House to pretend
to be good. Blank-faced dolls stare up at me.
Pretend oven filled with plastic fish-fingers.
Pretend windows with flowery curtains
sewn by someone else’s mother. Pretend hoover,
pretend washing machine. Pretend teapots
and tea-set. I watch through a gap in the wall
as my teacher sits in her chair, crossing her legs
in the way she told us only yesterday
we should copy. Be ladylike she said.
Stop showing your knickers. I’m burning in here
as she calls the class to order, waits for them
to cross their legs and settle. I long to sit
at her feet, listen to all the old stories
of sleeping women who wait to be rescued.
The book is a bird, its wings held tight in her hands.
She bends the cover back so the spine cracks,
balances it on one palm, turns to me and tells me
turn around, at once, face the wall.