Cheryl Follon was born in 1978 in Ayrshire, where she grew up. She studied at the University of Glasgow for four years, switching from Law to English and Scottish Literature, then took an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin. She now lives in Glasgow. In 2002 she published a pamphlet, Tales from a Small Island, with Akros, and was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary. She won third prize in Ireland’s Strokestown Poetry Competition in 2002. All Your Talk (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) is her first book of poems.

About All Your Talk:

"All Your Talk is both wild and formal, with poems that are beautifully shaped and deeply, genuinely dramatic – grippingly so. This creates a really attractive, at times spellbinding, mix of formal restraint and surging ecstasy or abandon or wildness or Dionysiac fling. It’s as though a riot observed a ritual"
—Brendan Kennelly

"These marvellous poems are a sustained achievement. They all have a kind of Regency air to them, founded in the context of Burns which they acknowledge, but with deeper roots and associations: Dunbar, the Ballads and ultimately Ovid (and, for the Irish reader, Merriman). What is distinguished here is the confidence to stick largely to a single form, even if it is one that the writer is so good at: local stories, translated with immense linguistic brio into the voice of a modern woman-Ovid"
—Bernard O’Donoghue