Alright! I’m Maria Ferguson, and I’m a poet and theatre-maker from Romford in Essex. My début one-woman show Fat Girls Don’t Dance won the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show in 2017. Follow-up show Essex Girl won Show of the Week at VAULT Festival in 2019 and was shortlisted for Soho Theatre’s Tony Craze Award.
My debut collection, Alright, Girl? was published by Burning Eye in March 2020 and was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes. It was also available to listen to as a binaural recording as part of the Living Record Festival in 2021.
My second collection, SWELL, will be published by Penguin on 30 January 2025 and is available to pre-order here! There’s more information on the publication in The Bookseller.
You can order your signed copy of my debut collection alongside my two playtexts here!
Eloquent and uncompromising, SWELL explores the triumphs and hardships of the journey to new motherhood – through pregnancy, miscarriage, birth, and beyond.
In the consultation room I stared
at the purple flowers in their purple
vase and imagined my insides:
an ocean, a cave, a storm.
Maria Ferguson’s second poetry collection is a raw and powerful documentation of one woman’s experience of becoming a mother. Against a backdrop of the sounds and sensations of daily life, she longs for her own mother’s embrace, observes as her body changes and charts a course through loss and wilting house plants toward recovery, empowerment, and renewal.
Tender, direct, and winningly witty, SWELL distils the poet’s complex feelings surrounding family and domesticity, exploring the contending weight and levity felt as she contemplates a thrillingly unfamiliar new chapter. Ferguson is a poet as alert to the absurd as to the shattering, and these are large-hearted poems, full of life and thought. Together, they invite the reader to join them in a search for self-acceptance, for freedom from shame, and for a path to stability in increasingly uncertain times.
“Flawless. An essential read for the 2020s.”
Salena Godden“Ferguson is a poet for the people, washing her dirty poems in public and holding your eye as she does so. We need more voices like hers, democratic and challenging. Clever, funny, frank and uncompromising. A warrior.”
Joelle Taylor
This was a lovely boost at the start of 2025! Thank you to The Guardian and David Wheatley for spotlighting ‘SWELL’ in their best new poetry roundup on 3 January. It means the world to see my collection in there and it’s already connected me with loads of lovely new people. Here I am, reading…
Maria Ferguson’s second poetry collection ‘SWELL’ is being published by Penguin in January 2025.
Maria Ferguson’s poems ‘I didn’t get to say goodbye, I barely said hello’ and ‘Anxiety sneaks in through the window one October’ appear in Magma 83 (July 2022).
You can purchase signed copies of my two playtexts in my online shop! They’re both published by Oberon Books and are available alongside my debut poetry collection Alright, Girl? (published by Burning Eye Books).
Maria Ferguson 