David Kinloch was born and brought up in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a graduate of the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford and was for many years a teacher of French. He is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. A winner of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award, he is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently In Search of Dustie-Fute (2017).
In the 1980s Kinloch co-founded and co-edited the poetry magazine, Verse. More recently he helped establish the Scottish Writers’ Centre and is a founder and organiser of the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. In 2013 he organised an international conference on the subject of ekphrastic poetry.