Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including two major biographies of T.S. Eliot: Young Eliot and Eliot After The Waste Land. Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, he is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His poetry has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and he has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards as well as the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

"A poet of great importance... fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy and at the very heart of our own time" -- Iain Crichton Smith Scotsman "Robert Crawford is one of the most distinctive of these new virtuosi. A gifted critic as well as a poet, he relishes the language game, but also keeps a grasp on more emotionally challenging matters" -- Carol Rumens Independent "Intelligent, witty, funny... These fine, acute poems, full of tight creases of meaning and sharp twists of language, show us better than most new fiction what is being lost and found every day in contemporary Scotland" -- James Wood Guardian "One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Scottish literature" -- Keith Bruce Herald