Nancy Gaffield is an Emeritus Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her first collection of poetry, Tokaido Road (CB editions 2011) was nominated for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and was awarded the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she completed a libretto for the opera, Tokaido Road: A Journey after Hiroshige (Shearsman 2014) for the composer Nicola Lefanu which premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival before touring nationally. Other publications include Continental Drift (Shearsman 2014), Meridian (Longbarrow 2019), and Wealden (Longbarrow 2021), a collaborative work of poems and music performed by The Drift. Her poems have appeared in leading journals and anthologies including The Forward Anthology, The Times Literary Supplement, Tears in the Fence, The Long Poem Magazine, Blackbox Manifold, Golden Handcuffs Review and Angel Exhaust. Destiny Manifest, published by Shearsman in 2026, is her sixth collection.