Matt Howard

Matt Howard is the recipient of the 2024/2025 YSP/Laureate Fund Residency supported by the T. S. Eliot Foundation, which has been made possible by YSP Trustee and Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.

Matt will use the residency to spend time exploring YSP’s natural landscape. He is interested in mapping the bird species at the Park and forming these findings into a third collection of poems.

I am so very grateful for the amazing opportunity of a residency at YSP. I can't wait to get to know and to be inspired by the collection and especially to explore the park at all hours and through the seasons.

- Matt Howard

Matt is manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. His first collection, Gall, was published by The Rialto in 2018 and was winner of the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize in 2019, and won Best First Collection in the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020. After eleven years working for the RSPB, Matt was Douglas Caster Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds from 2021-2023. His second collection, Broadlands, is published by Bloodaxe.

You may also like

  1. News

    Laurel Prize 2022

    25 August 2022
  2. Sean Scully, Wall Dale Cubed, 2018 Courtesy the artist and YSP at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
    Art Outdoors

    Sean Scully: Wall Dale Cubed

    Made for YSP, Wall Dale Cubed uses 1000 tonnes of Yorkshire stone from a local quarry and was constructed over many weeks. Importantly to the artist, this colossal work is built in the same way throughout, which connects to ancient stone walls in Ireland, so that ‘when looking at the outside of the block, one can feel the inside without being able to see it’.
  3. Marialuisa Tadei, Octopus 2011. Courtesy the artist and YSP at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
    Art Outdoors

    Marialuisa Tadei: Octopus

    Octopus (Polipo) is formed of hand-cut, coloured glass tiles which are carefully pieced together over the concrete and steel structure. It is a key example of Tadei’s use of mosaic to elevate everyday forms into a more ethereal realm.
  4. Three nude male bronze figures with white painted faces, displayed outdoors.
    Art Outdoors

    Elisabeth Frink: Riace II, III and IV

    The Riace figures are inspired by the 5th century BCE bronze sculptures that were rediscovered in the sea off the coast of the Riace region of Italy in 1972.