Esther Morgan was born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire. She first started writing poetry while working as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 1997, she taught on UEA's undergraduate creative writing course and for the Department of Continuing Education. After a teaching exchange to Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, Morgan returned to UEA where she edited four editions of the poetry anthology Reactions. She was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 1998 and her first collection, Beyond Calling Distance, was published by Bloodaxe in 2001. It won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second collection, The Silence Living in Houses (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), was largely inspired by her time caretaking a run-down Edwardian house in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. In 2010 she won the Bridport Poetry Prize for her poem 'This Morning', included in her third collection Grace (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. As well as freelance teaching and editing work, Esther Morgan is currently Historic Recordings Manager for the Poetry Archive, the world's largest online collection of poets reading their own work: www.poetryarchive.org. After four years in Oxfordshire, she moved back to East Anglia, and now lives in Suffolk.