Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) grew up in Glasgow, studied at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, and later taught at the Universities of Leicester and Birmingham. She worked both as a poet and a critical theorist, and her critical study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was published by Manchester University Press in 1978. Her poetry collections included Identi-Kit (1967), the award-winning Language Games (1971) and the posthumous On the Periphery (1976).