Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor and educator from Bristol, England, now living in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua) and Poets (The Red Ceilings) and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022.

Her chthonic sequel to Corpses, Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), featuring illustrations by Joshua Rothes, was published in Autumn 2024, as well as her box set of postcard poems Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla).

Her most recent publication is Some Deer, published by Broken Sleep.

Vik’s creative and critical work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, PN Review, The Rialto, Magma, 3am Magazine, Tentacular, Perverse, Shearsman and Tears in the Fence. In America: Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, The Indianapolis Review and Tiny Molecules.

Her review of Lee Sumyeong’s Just Like, translated by Colin Leemarshall, was recently published in Exacting Clam.

Vik’s writing has featured in many anthologies, most recently in Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, edited by Peter Johnson and Cassandra Atherton.

A Poetry School tutor, teaching on the Surreal Narrative and the Grotesque in Poetry, she has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham, where her supervisor was the Forward Prize-winning poet and novelist, Luke Kennard.

Having performed in cities including Seattle, Los Angeles, Prague and Paris, Vik is a regular at the European Poetry Festival. She is Associate Editor of Sublunary Editions and Co-Editor of Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius magazine.

Vik’s work has been translated into Czech and Latvian and she has collaborated with poets and performers from Switzerland, Slovenia, Latvia and is currently collaborating with the Estonian poet, Kristjan Halijak.

She was recently commissioned for the arts-council funded project, Sleeve Notes, to collaborate with the musician Billy Fuller for Record Store Day 2025.

Vik is also the director of Disrupted Blue Indie Press Publicity.