Farley was born in
Liverpool in 1965. He studied painting at the
Chelsea School of Art, and has lived in
London,
Brighton and
Cumbria. Farley's first collection of poetry,
The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998) won a
Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1998, and was shortlisted for the
Whitbread Prize. The book also gained him the
Somerset Maugham Award, and in 1999 he won the
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. From 2000 to 2002, he was the poet-in-residence at the
Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. His second collection,
The Ice Age (2002), received the
Whitbread Poetry Award. In 2004, Farley was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's
Next Generation poets. His third collection,
Tramp in Flames (2006), was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. A poem from the collection, ‘Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second’, was awarded the
Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem. The same year he also published a study of
Terence Davies' film,
Distant Voices, Still Lives. In 2007, he edited a selection of
John Clare for Faber's
Poet to Poet series. As a broadcaster Farley has made many arts features and documentary programmes for radio and television, as well as original radio dramas, and his poems for radio are collected in
Field Recordings: BBC Poems 1998-2008. He makes regular appearances on
BBC Radio 4’s
Saturday Review,
Front Row and
BBC Radio 3's
The Verb, and he presented the contemporary poetry programme
The Echo Chamber on
Radio 4 from 2012 to 2018. Farley's book
Edgelands, a non-fiction journey into England's
overlooked wilderness (co-authored with
Michael Symmons Roberts) was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011. It received the
Royal Society of Literature’s
Jerwood Award and the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award 2012, and was serialised as a BBC Radio 4
Book of the Week. His fourth collection,
The Dark Film, was a
Poetry Book Society Choice in 2012. In 2009, Farley received the
E. M. Forster Award from the
American Academy of Arts & Letters. He was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 2012. Farley currently lives in
Lancashire and is Professor of Poetry at
Lancaster University. His fifth collection,
The Mizzy, was shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award and the 2019
T. S. Eliot Prize. His sixth collection,
When It Rained for a Million Years, was shortlisted for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize. ==Awards==