Martha Sprackland is a writer, editor and translator from Merseyside. She was co-founder and poetry editor of Cake magazine, assistant poetry editor for Faber & Faber, and one of the founding editors of multilingual arts magazine La Errante. From 2018 to 2021 she worked at Poetry London, first as associate editor, and then as acting poetry editor. Martha is the editor of independent press Offord Road Books and from late 2021 took up the role of poetry editor with publishing house and production company CHEERIO Publishing. She is a member of the Rathbones Folio Academy and a Trustee for the Rebecca Swift Foundation.

Her poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in Poetry Review, London Review of Books, Five Dials, the Guardian, New Humanist, Magma, Poetry London and many other places. Martha has performed at a number of festivals, has participated in translation workshops in Bulgaria and in Tunisia, and in 2017 spent a month in residence at Yaddo, NY. Her versions of Arabic poems by Zouleikha Elhamed, from Mauritania, and Fatima Miftah Hasan Balkhayrat, from Libya, via translations by Noureddine Fekir, were published in Modern Poetry in Translation in 2019. She has translated the work of Spanish poet Ana Gorría (for Debacle Ediciones, 2020), and Venezuelan poet Gladys Mendía (Ledbury Festival/MPT), and Argentinian poet Verónica Viola Fisher (in Temporary Archives: Poems by Women of Latin America, Arc, 2022). Several of her own poems are translated into Arabic for an anthology of contemporary British poetry in Arabic translation (British Council, forthcoming). In 2021 she was shortlisted for the Peirene Stevns Prize for Translation.

Martha's debut pamphlet, Glass As Broken Glass, was published by Rack Press in 2017; a second, Milk Tooth, was published by Rough Trade Books in 2018 and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. Her debut collection, Citadel, was published by Pavilion Poetry in 2020, and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award. She is currently working on fiction.

 

"[With] formal acuity Martha Sprackland's 'Domestic' characterizes a broken relationship as helplessly frozen syntax teetering on that very word – as – everything that's just happened in a nameless quarrel 'as' something faraway, free of it, clear of it, like smoke or sky. Numbness of spent emotion, wonderfully anatomized: 'Glass as broken glass."' – Glyn Maxwell

"Sprackland refreshes the domestic and mundane in poems which are outwardly calm, but lit from within to reveal unusual visionary angles." – Eric Gregory Award judges 2014