MAGGIE SAWKINS
Maggie Sawkins lives in an old Station Master’s House on the Isle of Wight. Her poetry collections include The Zig Zag Woman, Charcot’s Pet, The House Where Courage Lives and Zones of Avoidance, for which she won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.
She facilitates creative writing projects in community settings, working with people from all walks of life, including prisoners, those affected by substance misuse and the refugee and asylum seeker community in Portsmouth. Maggie also hosted an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme Tongue and Talk, exploring Portsmouth dialect through poetry.
Maggie is currently Poet in Residence at Art-House-Life at the historic Osborne Stable Block in East Cowes. Her 2026–27 residency includes new writing, workshops and collaborations with artists based at the studio.
WRITE ON WIGHT EVENT
Writers' Residencies
As current Poet in Residence at Art-House-Life based in Osborne House Stable Block, Maggie Sawkins will present work inspired by her collaboration to date with the artist Joanna Kori.
The presentation will be followed by a conversation between Maggie and Joanna about writers’ residencies and the mutual opportunities they offer - from exploring each other’s language forms and exchanging perspectives, to opening new creative directions for both parties that might not have otherwise emerged.
Flyweight
Flyweight is a new collection of poems by Maggie Sawkins, with an introduction by poet Fran Lock.
At once about boxing and about much more than boxing, Flyweight explores the surprising relationship between the fighter and the poet: two disciplines shaped by rhythm, timing, body, breath, instinct and expression.
Boxing and poetry both become ways of understanding a life. Through humour, wordplay and moments of vulnerability, Maggie explores family, illness, pain, survival and transformation, finding unexpected connections between the physical language of the boxing ring and the expressive possibilities of poetry.
The collection plays with the idea contained within its title: “fly” and “weight” — the possibility of becoming light enough to soar while also developing the strength to land a punch. Poetry and boxing become parallel ways of negotiating the space between flying and falling.
Published by Culture Matters, Flyweight developed alongside Maggie’s live literature production of the same name, which combines spoken word, audio and video in an exploration of the poetry of boxing.
Award-winning poet Maggie Sawkins joins Write on Wight’s Writers’ Residencies to explore what a residency can offer a writer: the time, place and creative relationships from which new work can emerge.
Drawing on her current year as Poet in Residence at Art-House-Life in East Cowes, Maggie will discuss writing in collaboration with artists, working within a particular place and community, and how a residency can open up unexpected directions in a writer’s work.
