Allison McVety's first collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was the overall winner of the 2006 Book & Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize 2008.

Her poems have appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London, have been broadcast on BBC radio and anthologised in the Forward Poems of the Decade 20022011 and The Best British Poetry 2013.

A second collection, Miming Happiness, was published in 2010 and a third, Lighthouses in 2014. In 2011 Allison won the National Poetry Competition and in 2013 was recorded at the Southbank Centre for the Poetry Library's 60th anniversary.