Kit Byford
Kit Byford is an award-winning poet and filmmaker and an emerging librettist.
Kit is an alum of the Barbican Young Poets and The London Library Emerging Writers Programme. They were the winner of the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition in 2020, and were shortlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2024. Their first pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, was published with ignitionpress in 2021. Their work has appeared in bath magg, Magma, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Wales, and in anthologies from Bloodaxe and Macmillan. Their work is forthcoming in the anthology Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices (Bloomsbury, July 2025).
Kit is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant. This has supported their first collection of poems, ‘patient zero’, about bats, plague and queer voices, as well as their development as an emerging librettist in opera and contemporary music, under the mentorship of Laura Attridge.
Kit has performed poetry for over fifteen years at poetry nights across the capital and the country, including at Yer Bard, Live Canon, BoxedIn and Burn After Reading, and at the Barbican Centre, the Royal Geographical Society, The Great Hall of Durham Castle and at the Houses of Parliament. They have had writing commissions with the Barbican, the Wellcome
Collection, South Bank University and the Royal Northern College of Music. They regularly run poetry workshops for The London Library and have extensive experience running workshops for students at secondary schools and universities.
Kit was a Britten Pears Young Artist 23-24 and was poet-in-residence on the English Song Course at Snape Maltings in 2023. The Styx, a cross-disciplinary opera project about trauma healing and mythology, is supported by Arts Council England. Previous initiatives include the Dead [Women] Poets Society, which they co-founded alongside Helen Bowell, Sarah Fletcher and Jasmine Simms, and Thorn, a grassroots cross-disciplinary arts collective in Durham.
Kit’s first short film, You Look Fine, won Best Writer at BFI Future Film Festival and the Women’s Rights Prize at Très Court International Film Festival; the film screened at BAFTA- and Oscar-accredited festivals interfilm Berlin, Cambridge Film Festival and Brussels Short Film Festival, and in numerous locations globally with the Institute Français. They have produced numerous artists’ films, including You Know Nothing of My Work by Guy Oliver, nominated for Film London’s Jarman Award; MU/T/T/ER by Kondo Heller which premiered at the Berlinale; and absent landscapes by Myriam Rey which screened at the ICA for London Short Film Festival 2025.
He Said I Was a Peach, ignitionpress 2021
Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices, Bloomsbury, 2025
Poetry Wales 60.1 Summer
From the Silence of the Stacks, New Voices Rise (Vol IV), The London Library
She is Fierce: Brave, bold and beautiful poems by women, Macmillan, 2018
Recent work:
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