Tim Turnbull is currently Writer in Residence at HMP Edinburgh and was the Writer in Residence at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival for 2006. He was awarded the Arts Foundation's Performance Poetry Fellowship in January 2006. The award is the first of its kind in Britain and Turnbull was selected from five nominees by a panel of judges after The Contenders performance at the Purcell Rooms at London's South Bank Centre.

Tim Turnbull's first poetry performance was in a Slam at Chat's Palace in Homerton, East London in 1994. Since then he has slammed, read and performed his work throughout Britain and abroad. Cussedly maintaining that he makes no distinction between writing for stage and page, he has also been widely published in magazines and on the web.

In the summer of 2004 he travelled to Germany to take part in the Poesie der Nachbar Project and was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Bursary to help with the completion of a second collection, 'Caligula on Ice'. He was Writer in Residence at HMYOI Werrington from 2004 t0 2006.

Turnbull was born and raised in North Yorkshire. After leaving school he worked for the Forestry Commission for eight years before leaving Yorkshire to study forestry at Newton Rigg in Cumbria. In 1992 he moved to London.

Between 1979 and 1994 Turnbull played and sang with a series of punk/ska/industrial bands — The Rockin' Molerats, S.A.F., The Live Lobsters, The Long Haired Lovers (in Sussex), The Dog Conspiracy (nee Dog) and finally Machine Intelligence — most of which received lashings of applause but little hard cash.

After the Chat's Palace Slam, Turnbull decided to concentrate on poetry. He enrolled on the Writing BA at Middlesex University in 1995. In 1996 and 1998 visited America with the Farrago and Heart of Darkness Slam Teams to compete against U.S. Slammers.

While at Middlesex he became involved with Haringey Arts Council (now Collage Arts) for whom he ran a series of highly successful schools poetry projects. He completed the M.A. in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University in 2002 and moved to Scotland.

Returning to the competitive poetic arena, Turnbull won the inaugural Edinburgh Book Festival Slam with a poem which had also been published in the Rialto.

Tim Turnbull lives in Highland Perthshire and is married with a Westie.