Kate Elspeth Simpson is a writer, editor, producer and academic based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. With a background in arts and literature publishing, her more recent projects have focused on interdisciplinary research, working at the intersection of Earth sciences and creative practice.

Kate is the former Associate Editor of Aesthetica (2016-2022), working across the print magazine and its associated events and awards including the BAFTA-Qualifying Aesthetica Short Film Festival, the Future Now Symposium, the Aesthetica Art Prize and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, collaborating with Apple, Audible, BBC, Granta and London Review of Books, amongst others.

She has independently edited for Faber, Valley Press and Magma, and was on AMBIT’s Executive Board of Poets (2021-2023). Titles she has edited have been celebrated for their ‘close focus on the botanical and the geological’ (Irish Times) and their ‘deep communion’ with nature (Poetry Society). Her anthology, Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency (2021), was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and a Guardian Book of the Year.

Kate has reviewed poetry and fiction for Poetry London, PN Review, Poetry Review, The London Magazine and Times Literary Supplement – contributing to the ‘Poetry Books of the Year’ and ‘Fiction of the Month’ columns for The Telegraph – and has also written widely on natural history, science and the environment.

She has served on several juries – including the Sony World Photography Awards – and has produced events for literary festivals including Durham Book Festival and VERVE. She was the inaugural producer of Summit: a Poetry School Festival (2024), an environmental literature festival in collaboration with the UK poet laureate.

From 2022-2026, she was part of the UK’s first Doctoral Training Programme in Extinction Studies, working as part of a cohort of researchers seeking to synthesise biological, social, and cultural schools of thought and offer renewed perspectives on what extinction is and means.

Kate currently teaches on the creative writing programmes at the University of Leeds.