Elisabeth Sennitt Clough grew up in the Cambridgeshire Fens, England. She is a crime novelist and poet whose work explores landscape, power and psychological inheritance.
Her poetry collections include Sightings, At or Below Sea Level, The Cold Store, My Name is Abilene and Sidewinder (forthcoming November 2026), and a pamphlet Glass. Her debut novel is Shadow Sister.
Glass won the inaugural Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and the 2017 Saboteur Award for Best Pamphlet; Sightings, her debut full collection, written during her MFA at ManMet, which was awarded the Michael Schmidt Prize for Best Portfolio (a poem from Sightings was also highly commended in the Forward Prize and published in the Forward Book of Poetry 2018. Elisabeth’s second full collection, At or Below Sea Level, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a poem from the book won the 2018 Shooter Literary Magazine Poetry Prize. A poem from her third collection The Cold Store was highly commended in the Forward Prize and published in the Forward Book of Poetry 2022. Elisabeth’s fourth full collection My Name is Abilene was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize best collection and is a Poetry Book Society Selection, autumn 2023. Elisabeth’s fifth collection, Sidewinder, is forthcoming in November 2026 from Salt Publishing. Sidewinder received a Society of Authors grant. Three poems from this new collection were recently published in Pennine Platform. Elisabeth’s debut novel, Shadow Sister, is published by Holand Press. In 2025 it was longlisted for the Jenny Brown Associates Prize.
The Cold Store, is available from Pindrop Press. It takes as its central motif an automated warehouse in the Fens. The collection examines the pyschogeography of the Fens, but through the metaphoric lens of one of the largest cold store facilities in the nation, located in the flat landscape of the Fens. The Cold Store is dark, haunting and unapologetic in its exploration of power relations. In a series of comic-sinister counter poems dotted throughout the collection, ‘The Cold Store’ becomes a shape-shifter, assuming different personae. Other poems explore themes of ecology and family. Arts Council England generously awarded Elisabeth a grant to work on this collection.
Elisabeth writes poetic memoir and narrative poetry, sometimes with a domestic theme. Yet, as her mentor Rebecca Goss suggests, ‘you will not find anything benign or cosy here. Sennitt Clough makes us look at things, not always comfortable things, using language that startles and excites.’ Influences include The Fresno School poets, notably Philip Levine.
‘Elisabeth Sennitt Clough has made a particular name for herself in Eastern England (she edits the Fenland Poetry Journal) but is a distinctive, musical voice in contemporary British poetry as my name is abilene confirms. This bold new collection is almost a verse novel, bewildering, mesmerising, powering forward at high speed, its tone and preoccupations constantly shifting. One moment we are at a Fenland cattle market or in ‘a four-dog yard with a flimsy chain-link fence’; the next we’re with the Romans or in the Bronze Age at Must Farm, and the verse adapts accordingly. It can be brutally abrupt, brokenly colloquial or lyrically expansive and there is constant attention to the sound. Sennitt Clough is in fact a superb performer of her own work and she knows that good poetry is as much about the language as the themes. But her often unsettling, sometimes shocking subject matter and the grotesques she summons are invariably presented under the big skies and within the merciless horizons of the Fens – still barely known today except for their peatlands and poverty, rich only in myth. It’s certainly time a poet reclaimed the area (‘try to remember a line by john clare’ she intones mournfully at one point) and Sennitt Clough is quick to mock the cliché picture of hovels and ‘savage minds’. Nevertheless, she shows us a deceptively benign world of maize fields, ditches, solar panels, ‘hollyhocks and chinese lanterns’, potatoes hardening in the black soil and chickens running loose, inhabited by characters who abuse and suffer abuse, who’ll chuck dead foxes in the back of a car and ‘don’t worry about the law/because it only exists in places like cambridge’. But Sennitt Clough is no Little Englander; she has lived in America and there is a powerful West Coast influence in the manner and presentation of her verse, though it is always superbly controlled. Whether you read my name is abilene as a filmic Modernist narrative or experience it like a vibrant stage drama (Jerusalem comes to mind) or simply select individual verses to enjoy, you will find here a thoroughly invigorating exploration of the universal in the local. These poems are anything but flat.’ —John Greening
Elisabeth was a recipient of the Arvon/Jerwood 2016/17 mentorship, the Toast Poets 2017/18 mentorship, Unislam 2019 and three Arts Council ‘Grants for the Arts’ Awards (2016, 2018, 2020, 2022). She is a Member of the Society of Authors and the ALCS. She is also founder of the Ely Poetry Society Stanza Group and for several years edited the Fenland Poetry Journal, an international poetry magazine with a local feel that also published artwork. Elisabeth was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and 2019.
In the past, Elisabeth has reviewed poetry chapbooks and full collections; her reviews have appeared in The North, Sphinx, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Bare Fiction to name a few. Her latest reviews include Helen Ivory’s The Anatomical Venus and Julia Webb’s Threat. Elisabeth is not considering requests for reviews and blurbs at present.
In 1998, Elisabeth studied English and Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University (formerly APU) for her BA. In 2001, she went on to complete an MA at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. She obtained her PhD from the Open University in 2010, where she studied under the supervision of Professor Dennis Walder. In 2013 she undertook a second MA – in Creative Writing with Teaching at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she graduated with distinction.
Elisabeth has lived and worked in Jakarta, Indonesia; Panama City, Florida; Fresno, California; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Maastricht, Netherlands, where she was a member of the Maastricht Writers’ Group. She is currently based in the Cambridgeshire Fens and can be found on X: @LizSennitt.