Welcome.

London-born Robin Houghton is a writer, poet & podcaster. Her first full collection of poems The Mayday Diaries was published by Pindrop Press in May 2025. Listen to Robin reading a few of the poems in this book.

Her pamphlet The Great Vowel Shift was published by Telltale Press, the poets’ collective she co-founded with Peter Kenny in 2014. In 2017 she self-published a handmade limited edition mini-pamphlet Foot Wear. All the Relevant Gods, Robin’s third pamphlet, won the Cinnamon Press Poetry Pamphlet competition in 2017 and was published in February 2018. Her fourth pamphlet Why? And other questions (2019) was a joint winner of the 2019 Live Canon Poetry Pamphlet Competition.

Her second handmade limited-edition pamphlet, Yo-Yo, is new for October 2025. More info and order here.

Robin’s poetry appears in many magazines including Agenda, The North, Stand, Magma, Mslexia, Prole, Poetry News, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Frogmore Papers and The Rialto, and in numerous anthologies. Also in The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 (Eyewear). She won the Hamish Canham Prize in 2013, the Stanza Poetry Competition in 2014 (and was runner-up in the same competition in 2016), the New Writer Competition in 2012 and the Visual Verse competition in 2022. Other competition placings include 2nd in the Plough Prize, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2019) and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition (2019).

Robin and her collaborator Peter Kenny have produced and presented the Planet Poetry podcast since 2020. Between them they have interviewed over seventy poets from the UK, Ireland, the USA & Canada, China and beyond.

Since 2017 she has produced a quarterly-updated spreadsheet of over 200 UK & Irish magazines with details of when, what and how to submit. Still a free service with around 3,000 subscribers and growing, this is one of the longest-standing and comprehensive sources of poetry submissions information available in the UK. Sign up here.

Robin also writes reviews for the Frogmore Papers and has written poetry-related features for Envoi, Poetry News and the Society of Authors magazine. Her A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines was published by Telltale Press in 2018, and updated for a second edition in 2020. She blogs at robinhoughtonpoetry.co.uk and is a Trustee of The Poetry Society.