Rising Star: Judith Palmer, writer/editor

The Poetry Society has announced with great fanfare the name of the new director who will see it into its centenary year. Judith Palmer is familiar to the society, having been its chair from 1999 to 2001 during a career spanning presenting poetry documentaries for Radio 4, programming for the London Metropolitan University's Women's Library, judging the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and writing a column about extreme sports. She promises to help poets by protecting copyright and to keep poetry in the spotlight by involving the 2012 Olympics and knitting a poem (yet to be chosen) into a huge scarf. "And people who think poetry's not useful, well, when it's really cold, [the knitting] could be used as blankets to wrap around starving poets who can't afford to pay their gas bills."