Earn Your Milk contains all the uncollected prose works of Tom Raworth, gathering together Letters from Yaddo, The Vein and Letter to Martin Stannard with his uncategorizable prose-work A Serial Biography, an extraordinary assembly memoir and reportage. This invaluable collection now makes widely available work which was previously hard to obtain or long out of print, it will delight fans as well as general readers wanting to discover more about one of the UK’s most widely-celebrated poets.


Tom Raworth was born in London just before the Second World War and has done everything wrong since. For half-a-century he has printed, published, translated and written poetry; has occasionally taught in several countries; and has read his own work and performed with other artists all over the world. He has a taste for spicy food from his father’s service in Burma and a quick temper from his Irish mother. He is at the moment of no fixed abode. In 2007, in Modena, he was awarded the Antonio Delfini Prize for “lifetime career achievement” though as he remarks “he is not yet dead.”