Fred Beake

Fred Beake was born in 1948 in Cheshire. He grew up in
remote countryside there and in the West Riding. His early
education was at East Keswick Primary School and Tadcaster
Grammar. He went rather abortively to Sussex University when
young, and holds a Classics degree from Bristol, where he went
in middle age. He has devoted a lot of his life to poetry, when
not being a hands-on father and working as a gardener, van
driver, or at other jobs.

He has translated widely from modern French, especially
Desnos, Char and Deguy, classical Latin and, more recently,
classical Greek, notably Aristophanes' Peace for the University
of Pennsylvania Press. He edited Mammon Press and The Poet's
Voice magazine in the eighties and nineties. He published a
number of pamphlets of his own poetry in the 1970s and 1980s
(notably The Fisher Queen, Northern House, 1988), which were
collected in The Whiteness of Her Becoming (Salzburg UP, 1992).

Since then he has published six volumes of poetry, notably
The Cyclops (Menard Press, 2002), New and Selected Poems
(Shearsman, 2006), and the Old Outlaw (Shoestring, 2011). His
most recent collection is Out of Silence (Poetry Salzburg). He has
reviewed for Acumen, Stand and other magazines.

Since 2003 he has been living in Torquay, Devon. He has two
children and four granchildren.

(2024)