About Simone
poet : writer : blogger
My Story
Simone Mansell Broome is Welsh-born. She studied English with American Studies at Sussex University, qualified both as a teacher of Speech and Drama and of EFL and taught privately, and at secondary and further education levels. There was a period of fifteen years or so working alongside her husband in two successful small businesses. After being a very long time on the other side of the Severn Bridge, she returned to Wales in 2007 to live and work on a small organic farm.
This farm has grown into a thriving family business with sustainability and community values at its core: it operates as a centre for ‘alternative’ weddings, for holidays – especially glamping holidays, for a variety of workshops and courses and as a ‘pop-up’ restaurant.
Simone has three published books of poetry, and two books of prose, has been recorded on Poetcasting and her poems have been read on radio and TV. Simone is a member of Second Light network of women poets & has poems on the ‘poetrypf’ website.
Simone has been successful in written and spoken poetry competitions.. She has been published in many anthologies, magazines, and ezines including:-
Carillon, Envoi, Roundyhouse, Buzz, Cinnamon Press, Ragged Raven, Boomslang, Cane Arrow Press, The Interpreter’s House, www.ink-sweat-and-tears.com, www.jbwb.co.uk, Leaf Books, Norwich’s Writers’ Circle Anthology, Templar Poetry, Iota, The Voice of Women in Wales, Red Lamp Black Piano, Poems for the Year 2020, Gwrthryfel Uprising, Wildfire Words, Dreich.
She has represented Wales in BBC Radio 4’s performance poetry slam. Fifty of Simone’s poems were translated into Romanian in 2020 as part of a Bucharest University M.A. dissertation. Simone has been commissioned to write poems by ITV, by a local theatre group and an art gallery.
Simone’s first children’s book, about a family of mice living through lockdown, was published by Pretty Pug Publishing in June 2021 – ‘Valletta and the Year of Changes’ . Simone is currently working on a memoir and another collection of poems
Recent Books
Getting Off Lightly
A e-book collection of 17 performance poems which are meant to be read aloud. Two have been published in Simone’s earlier books. Several have darker themes, but humour is a thread linking many of them.
Pause-12 months of going nowhere
Adapted from the blog, locklites.co.uk, written in 2020 and 2021, about life on a smallholding and wedding business in rural West Wales.
Valletta and the Year of Changes
Gentle advantures pf a fiery, busy little mouse who squeaks her mind. Sensitively exploring the events of the last few years but with larger messages around family support, community and finding hope.
‘lively, skilful and perceptive – Simone hits the nail squarely on the head in areas so many poets never even reach’
Phil Bowen
Other nice things people have written
These are finely observed poems, verses we can all identify with and enjoy.. poems to make you think. Well worth a read
Phil Carradice
Simone Mansell Broome’s peotry is confident, fast-paced and eclectic. These exciting poems cover a wide range of topics: hen parties, Napalm,mosquitoes, and Cromwell, bubblewrap, Facebook, Google, cats, dogs, dementia, Michael Jackson,, Greece, childhood, the death of parents.
She is a prolific poet who observes life around her, and approaches subjects from an oblique angle to show us things we haven’t seen, She is concerned about how we live now, in the “justfornowplace”, and the people from her past and present who are her landscape.
Sue Moules
A rich and varied collection, where hope abounds against a backdrop of the vagaries of life, childhood, the past, love, fear; the icons of modern life. Wales and the wider world provide an anthem for the internal world which travels to the reader in clear and direct language. Simone Mansell Broome’s collection is a timepiece of individual and collective narrative.
Maggie Harris
These are lived-in, unblinkered poems of great insight, range and skill…. there’s real energy here matched by a dark laugh-out loud humour and above all – they’re readable.
Phil Bowen