Fran Lock is a sometime itinerant dog whisperer and author of three poetry collections, Flatrock (Little Episodes, 2011), The Mystic and the Pig Thief (Salt, 2014), and Dogtooth (Out Spoken Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in various places, most recently POETRY and Poetry Review. She is the winner of the 2014 Ambit Poetry Competition, the 2015 Out Spoken Poetry Prize, and the 2016 Yeats Poetry Prize. Her poems ‘Last Exit to Luton’, ‘Gentleman Caller’, and ‘Epistle from Inside the Sharknado’ came third and were commended in the National Poetry Competition 2014, 2015, and 2016 respectively. Her poem ‘Rita of the White Bees’ received an Honourable Mention in the 2017 Yeats Poetry Prize. She was Highly Commended by the Forward Prize for her poem ‘Melpomene’ and appears in the Forward Prize anthology 2017. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Launanum Press alongside Abigail Parry and Kimberley Campanello. She is currently undertaking a practice based Ph.D at Birkbeck on the relationship between the epistolary form in contemporary poetry and the use of letters in therapeutic contexts.
