Poet, songwriter, film maker, critic, editor, teacher and translator, Donny O'Rourke was born, brought up and educated in Renfrewshire and has degrees from the University of Glasgow and from Cambridge. Many fellowships and awards have come his way including the Hermann Kesten Stipendium which took him as Glasgow's representative to its twin city, Nürnberg, in May 2004. After several years (and very senior positions) in television and journalism, Donny went freelance. He still broadcasts regularly and is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, CDs and works for the theatre including translations, mostly from French.

His collections include The Waistband and other poems (Polygon, 1997) and On a Roll: a Jena notebook (Mariscat, 2001), and with Richard Price he published a pamphlet of versions of modern French lyrics, Eftirs/Afters (Au Quai, 1996). He has spent some time in Nuremberg, having received the Hermann Kesten Stipendium, and a dual language collection of poems resulting from his time there was published in 2005, Aus dem Wartesaal der Poesie/From Poetry's Waiting Room (Spätlese Verlag, Nürnberg).