Sam Szanto is an award-winning, Pushcart prize-nominated writer living in Durham. Her poetry pamphlet 'This Was Your Mother' was published by Dreich Press in 2024; her collaborative pamphlet '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', 'Dust Poetry', 'Northern Gravy', 'South Carolina Review', 'The Storms' and 'The North'. She is currently working on a practice-led PhD on the poetry of parenthood and absence / attachment at York St John University.

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Sam 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.

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

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Follow Sam at Instagram samszantowriter, Facebook sam-szanto, X sam_szanto and Blue Sky samszanto.bsky.social