Matthew Hollis was born in Norwich in 1971, and now lives in London. After its shortlisting for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, his first full-length collection Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award (the first time for a poetry book) and for the Whitbread Poetry Award. Ground Water was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2016 he published two limited letterpress and hand-made pamphlets, Stones (Incline Press) and East (Clutag Press). His second book-length collection, Earth House, is published by Bloodaxe in 2023. His biography, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber, UK, 2011; Norton, US, 2012), won the Costa Biography Award, the H.W. Fisher Biography Award and a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, and was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Biography of the Year. His second "biography", The Waste Land: The Biography of a Poem, was published by Faber in the UK and Norton in the US in 2022. He is also co-editor of Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), and editor of the Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (Faber, 2011).
