Winner of Saltire Society/National Library of Scotland Scottish Research Book of the Year Award 2007.

Robert Crawford was born in Lanarkshire in 1959 and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. He is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His Selected Poems was published by Jonathan Cape in 2005 and he is author of six other collections of poetry. His many other books of criticism and literary history include Devolving English Literature (second edition, 2000) and The Modern Poet (2001). In 2006 Penguin Classics published The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, which he edited with Mick Imlah. Robert Crawford has read and lectured widely in Britain and North America.