This Was Your Mother

Sam Szanto is an award-winning, Pushcart prize-nominated writer living in Durham (UK). Her poetry pamphlet 'This Was Your Mother' was published by Dreich Press in 2024; 'Splashing Pink' (with Annie Cowell), was published by Hedgehog Press in 2023 and was a Poetry Book Society Winter Pamphlet Choice; she also writes short stories and her debut collection 'If No One Speaks' was published in 2022 by Alien Buddha Press. She has won writing competitions including the 2024 Wirral Festival Poetry Prize, the Charroux Poetry Prize and the First Writer Poetry Prize and has poems in journals including 'Rialto', 'Northern Gravy', ''South Carolina Review' and 'The North'. She is currently working on a PhD on mother-poetry and identity and is also a general poetry & prose editor for 'The Afterpast Review'. 

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She grew up in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Her jobs have included ice cream seller, Lush retailer and marketing for a national blind charity, and working as a freelance copy-editor, proofreader and English tutor since 2009. She has an MA with distinction in Writing Poetry from the Poetry School London / Newcastle University, and is currently working on a practice-led PhD on mother-poetry and identity at York St John University.

Her surname is Hungarian and is pronounced (in English) San-to. She's heard all the Santa jokes.