Matthew Hollis

Matthew Hollis works as a British poet, biographer, and editor, often reconstructing literary lives through close attention to poems, letters, and publishing history. His first collection, Ground Water, received strong critical recognition, while Now All Roads Lead to France, his biography of Edward Thomas, won the Costa Biography Award. In 2022, he published The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, issued by Faber and Faber in Britain and Norton in the United States. Hollis follows the circumstances in which T. S. Eliot composed the poem, including Ezra Pound's decisive editorial interventions and Vivien Eliot's place in its personal history. The result treats revision, friendship, illness, and postwar culture as parts of the poem's formation. Hollis has also published Earth House and served as a poetry editor. His combined experience as poet and literary biographer allows him to explain formal choices without losing sight of the human relationships behind a canonical modernist work.