Photograph © Clare Park
Ilse Pedler is a poet and veterinary surgeon. She lives and works in The Lake District juggling writing with the unpredictability of sick animals. She is an experienced and inclusive workshop leader, is poet in residence at Sidmouth Folk Festival, facilitates Dove Cottage Poets in Grasmere and organises poetry events at The Farmer’s Arms community pub in Lowick Green. She is co-editor of Bending The Arc a Substack magazine of thrutopian writing https://bendingthearcmagazine.substack.com/
She has also been a Morris dancer for over 30 years and no longer tries to hide it.
She is widely published in magazines and anthologies. She was shortlisted in The Rialto Nature Poetry competition in 2014 and 2015 and in the Bridport prize 2016, commended in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2017 and long listed in the National Poetry Competition in 2018. She was runner up in the Mslexia poetry Competition in 2019, placed 3rd in the Magma Poetry Competition in 2023 and was the winner of the Ver Poetry Competition in 2025. Publications include The Dogs That Chase Bicycle Wheels (Seren 2016) winner of the 2015 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, Auscultation, (Seren 2021), We’ll Meet You There (Dialect Press 2026) a collaboration with poets Alice Willitts and Hilary Watson.
“I bring my experience as a practising veterinary surgeon to my poetry, writing about our relationships with animals and how they impact on our lives. In my poems I let you into the secrets of the consulting room, operating theatre and farm; the equipment, the techniques and the rituals and hierarchy. You are permitted access to the functioning of bodies and their failings and invited to wonder at insides laid bare during surgical procedures.
In Auscultation, I also explore the idea of listening and being listened to through poems about motherhood and my experience of being a step mother. The fairy tales of my childhood found their way into some of these poems; queens, castles and three wishes interweaving with the contemporary challenges of step parenting and blended families. In these poems I interrogate the importance of the types of care we give and receive.”
More recently Ilse has been turning towards writing about the natural world and the impact of the climate crisis. We’ll Meet You There is an exploration of the concept of thrutopia, the radical, hopeful imagining of paths through our current crises towards a liveable thriving future.
‘This collection is urgent and restorative – deeply attentive to the world in its precarity and insistent about the possibility of healing.Through tangible visions of change and bold re-thinking of how we live, this collection invites readers to imagine what is possible and desirable when we dare to think differently, act differently, and believe that better futures can still be made.’
Ilse Pedler Poet 