Welcome to www.billgreenwell.com. Please do feel free to browse. Here's a rough guide.

The Art/English course: an account of the course at Exeter College run by Graham Rich and myself. Lost Lives: short biographies of Victorians. Poetry: all my back numbers. You'll find the whole text of the now out-of-print Tony Blair Reminds Me Of A Budgie, and many other poems written during a nine-year stint as New Statesman's house poet. You'll also find two hundred published and unpublished poems. New Statesman Comps: an in-progress look at early Week-end Review/ New Statesman competitions. The Weekly Poem: every week a satirical poem on current events is published here.

  • Bill Greenwell
  • Bill Greenwell
  • Bill Greenwell
  • Bill Greenwell
  • Bill Greenwell
  • Bill Greenwell
  • Bill Greenwell
  • Bill Greenwell
  • Bill Greenwell

The Weekly Poem

The Weekly Poem offers you a spoof or comment on current events, and there'll be a new one - weekly.

As supported by

Poetry Clinic

The Poetry Clinic runs over a ten week period twice a year. Originally it was part of the University of Exeter's Continuing Education Programme. Over its ten years, it has supported many contributors in developing their writing, and many of the one hundred participants have gone on to be successful and published poets.

Fish in a Tree

"A Fish in a Tree" is Bill's account of tracing the descendants of the Sunderland couple Mary Wilson and George Greenwell, who married in 1811.

New Statesman Competitions

New Statesman Competitions: a history of the competitions in New Statesman, going back to the first (in another magazine, The Week-end Review, in 1930). The aim is to look at the competitions up to the end of World War II, and perhaps also to look at the satirical poets in the NS.

Lost Lives

Lost Lives: individuals in the census of Sunday April 3rd, 1881

These biographical sketches are an attempt to cut some names on tombstones, male as well as female. Some of the names may be familiar. One of them was even declared one of the Great Britons of the millennium; but her life itself seems singularly obscured by the murk of our memories. They were not violets; neither did they shrink, exactly. But their lives are gradually fading, like print on ageing paper. The census of 1881 inks in their outline, tells their truths and half-truths.