Emery was born and grew up in
Manchester, England, and went to a convent-run primary school in
New Moston before attending grammar school in
Prestwich. It was following this that he began to study sculpture, painting and printmaking. He continued at Manchester College of Art and Design before taking a degree at
Leeds Polytechnic, graduating in 1986. He subsequently destroyed all his art work, and began to focus upon his writing. After a brief attempt to train as an art teacher, Emery began work in a variety of jobs: insurance clerk, an administrator in a haematology department, a data manager in an oncology department, an information designer in public transport, and design manager at the
British Council, before embarking on a publishing career — ending up as a director at Cambridge University Press. He left to concentrate on writing and literary publishing in 2002. Emery's poetry began appearing in journals throughout the 1990s including
The Age,
Jacket,
Magma,
Poetry London,
Poetry Review,
Poetry Wales,
PN Review,
Quid and
The Rialto. He was anthologised in
New Writing 8 in 1999. A pamphlet,
The Cutting Room, was published by Barque in 2000. A first full-length poetry collection,
Dr. Mephisto, was published by Arc in 2002. He has travelled to perform his work in the US and Australia. A second full-length collection of poetry,
Radio Nostalgia, was published by Arc Publications in 2006. He was anthologised in
Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010), edited By Roddy Lumsden. Emery is a contributor to
The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing, edited by David Morley and Philip Neilsen (CUP, 2012). A third collection of poetry,
The Departure, was published by Salt in 2012. His most recent collections are
Modern Fog (Arc, 2024), and
Wonder (Salt, 2025). Emery's early poetry was characterised by a
dystopian vision of the world, the use of varied personae, an exuberant vocabulary, black humour and dramatic changes in register and tone. His work can shift between mainstream poetics and wild experimentation, often combining both within a single volume. His central themes appear to be the incongruousness of moral experience within modern society, the collapse or eradication of identity, and both spiritual and secular redemption. He is also the author of a writers’ guide on publishing and marketing poetry, 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell. Working as Chris Hamilton-Emery, he is a Director of
Salt Publishing an independent literary press based in
Cromer,
England. He was awarded an
American Book Award in 2006 for his services to American literature. Hamilton-Emery has sat on the Boards of the
Independent Publishers Guild and Planet Poetry, and occasionally works as a consultant in the publishing industry in the United Kingdom. He lives and works in
Cromer. == Bibliography ==