Word Factory participants have included the writers A. S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, Tobias Wolff, A. L. Kennedy, Ben Okri, Michael Morpurgo, Deborah Levy, Marina Warner, Yiyun Li, Kevin Barry, David Constantine, Lionel Shriver, and Alexei Sayle.
Galvin is also a founder member of Women In Journalism, has served as a trustee of English PEN and Poet in the City, and is a patron of Visual Verse.
As a poet, she is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Heinrich Böll residency on Achill Island,[17] and an Arts Council England DYCP award.
David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, wrote of her work Black and Blue: “A crown of sonnets seems at first an intractable and even intimidating prospect.
This is such a performance.”[18] Alison Brackenbury wrote in P. N. Review of Galvin’s work Rough Translation that she “translates life into elemental cycles”,[19] and Ian Pople wrote in the Manchester Review of Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva as “a technical tour-de-force combining the Latin Mass with the argot of two-tone”.