Rebecca Tamás

Rebecca Tamás (born 1988) is a British poet, writer, critic, and editor. She is the daughter of Hungarian philosopher and public intellectual Gáspár Miklós Tamás.

Tamás studied creative writing at the University of Warwick and at the University of Edinburgh, where she won the Grierson Verse Prize, before completing a PhD at the University of East Anglia. She is a lecturer in creative writing at York St John University, where she co-convenes The York Centre for Writing Poetry Series.

Tamás is the editor, with Sarah Shin, of the anthology ''Spells: 21st-century Occult Poetry'' (Ignota Press, 2018). She has published three pamphlets of poetry: ''The Ophelia Letters (''Salt, 2013), ''Savage'' (Clinic, 2017) and ''Tiger'' (Bad Betty Press, 2018), and the full-length poetry collection ''Witch'' (Penned in the Margins, 2019). The poet and journalist Ben Wilkinson, writing in ''The Guardian'', said that ''Witch'' "has caused a stir, and it's not hard to see why". Tamás has been described in ''this is tomorrow'' magazine as "crafting a world of linguistic ritual and transformation around her". In 2020, she published the prose collection ''Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman.'' ''MAP Magazine'' commissioned three responses from artists to the book.

The composer Freya Waley-Cohen has set eight poems from ''WITCH'' to music: the first complete performance of ''Spell Book'' took place at Milton Court in London on 1 February 2024. Waley-Cohen's opera ''WITCH'', with libretto by Ruth Mariner, was inspired by the Rebecca Tamás collection of the same name. It was staged at the Royal Academy of Music in 2022, and at Longborough Festival Opera the same year. Waley-Cohen has said that she was attracted to the way Tamás's "language flips between shocking and beautiful, catching your attention and making you see something shocking in a new light".

Tamás's writing has appeared in publications including ''London Review of Books', Financial Times', The Poetry Review, The White Review', The Guardian', ArtReview'', and ''Frieze''.

Tamás was the joint winner of the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize. Provided by Wikipedia