Robin Robertson

Robin Robertson was brought up on the northeast coast of Scotland. After taking degrees in Scotland and Canada he moved to London to work in publishing, for Penguin, Secker & Warburg and Jonathan Cape. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Robertson’s books of poetry are A Painted Field (1997), Slow Air (2002), Swithering (2006), The Wrecking Light (2010), Hill of Doors (2013), Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems (2014), The Long Take (2018) and Grimoire (2020).He has also published a number of books of translations: The Deleted World (2006), a selection of new versions of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer; Medea (2008); and the Bacchae (2013).

He has received a number of awards, including the Petrarca-Preis, the Cholmondeley Award, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and all three Forward Prizes. The Long Take won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction and the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was the first poem to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Photo by Niall McDiarmid