Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He co-edited the magazines Perfect Bound and Numbers while helping organize various Cambridge Poetry Festivals (1977-1985) and a Poetry International at the South Bank Centre (1988). His many volumes of poetry include a Selected Poems (2003), The Look of Goodbye (2008) and Like the Living End (2013). Buried Music, his latest full collection, will be published in 2015. He was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for This Other Life (1988), while both The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) and The Returning Sky (2012) were recommendations of the Poetry Book Society, and The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007) received the John Florio Prize for translation from the Italian in 2008. Other publications include a collection of aphorisms, Spirits of the Stair (2009), four volumes of literary criticism, the most recent being Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010), a collection of short fiction, Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories (2013), various edited collections, anthologies, The Complete Poems, Translations & Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). His work is the subject of The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, ed. Adam Piette and Katy Price (2007), and a new collection of essays on his writings edited by Tom Phillips is in preparation. The literary editor for Two Rivers Press, he is Head of Department and Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.