Elma Mitchell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elma Mitchell | |
|---|---|
| Born | 19 November 1919 Airdrie, Lanarkshire, Scotland |
| Died | 23 November 2000 (aged 81) Buckland, St Mary, Somerset, England |
Elma Mitchell (November 19, 1919 – November 23, 2000) was a Scottish-born poet and translator based in Somerset, who published several well-received books of poetry in the 1970s and 1980s.
Mitchell was born in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire.[1] She attended Prior's Field School in Surrey, and won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a first in English in 1941.[2] She went on to achieve a diploma in librarianship at the School of Librarianship, University College London.[3]
Career
Mitchell worked as a librarian and information officer for the BBC during World War II (from 1941 to 1943).[2][3] She moved to Buckland St Mary, Somerset, and worked as a freelance writer and translator; she also did some amateur archaeological work in South Cadbury.[4] Some of her poems were published in New Statesman in the 1960s.[4] Her "quirkily original" poem "Thoughts After Ruskin" was first published in 1967; it won awards and was included in several anthologies.[3] She published several books of poetry in the 1970s and 1980s.[1]
Many of Mitchell's poems have feminist themes of domestic work, body image, creative frustration, and bereavement.[5][6][7] "Mitchell frequently alludes to the strength tapped from the life force of routine necessities and occupations, especially women's traditional occupations," noted Marilyn Hacker in 1997.[8] "This is a woman who is very conscious of being a body with all that implies of delight and restriction," commented poet Herbert Lomas in 1988.[9]
Mitchell died in 2000, at the age of 81, in Buckland St Mary, Somerset.[3] Her poems continue to be included in anthologies, decades after her death.[6][10][11]
Awards
- 1977 Cheltenham Festival Poetry Competition[12]
- 1999 Cholmondeley Award[13]
