Robin Robertson

Born in Perthshire, Robin Robertson was brought up on the northeast coast of Scotland where, as he says in a 2008 interview, “history, legend and myth merged cohesively in the landscape.” Robertson’s early influences include the stories of Celtic and Classical myth, the vernacular ballads, and folklore. His deeply sensory poems explore notions of love and loss framed by the dialogue between the classical and the contemporary. Describing the poet’s task, Robertson tells of the desire to reveal “the refreshed world and, through a language thick with sound and connotation and metaphor, make some sense: some new connection between what is seen and felt and what is understood.” As a reviewer for the New Yorker notes, “The genius of this Scots poet is for finding the sensually charged moment—in a raked northern seascape, in a sexual or gustatory encounter—and depicting it in language that is simultaneously spare and ample, and reminiscent of early Heaney or Hughes.”

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Robertson has published seven books of poetry and received many awards including the Petrarca-Preis, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Cholmondeley Award. He is the first poet to win the Forward Prize in all three categories: best first collection for A Painted Field (1997), best collection for Swithering (2006), and best single poem for “At Roane Head” which appeared in The Wrecking Light (2010). His selected poems, Sailing the Forest, was published in 2014. The Long Take (2018), a narrative poem set in post-war America, was the first poem to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize; it won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction. Robertson’s most recent book is Grimoire (2020), a a re-imagining of Scottish folk tales,

Robertson has also edited a collection of essays, Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (2003), translated two plays of Euripides, Medea and the Bacchae, and, in 2006, published The Deleted World, a selection of free English versions of poems by Tomas Tranströmer. 

Robertson has worked at several major London publishing houses, and has edited the work of many writers, including John Banville, John Burnside, Anne Carson, J.M. Coetzee, Seamus Deane, Anne Enright, Geoffrey Hill, Michael Longley, Sharon Olds, and Peter Redgrove. He lives in London.