Andrew Buchanan Jackson was born in Glasgow in 1965, raised in the village of Bramhall, Cheshire, and then attended Bell Baxter High School in Cupar, Fife. He studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and has a PhD in Creative Writing from Sheffield Hallam University, where his thesis was titled ‘The Polar Sublime in Contemporary Poetry of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration’.
In 2000, Jackson qualified as a librarian and worked at the Glasgow College of Building and Printing before moving on to NHS Education for Scotland in 2005. He was the project manager responsible for creating the first online catalogue for NHS Scotland libraries. He went on to work at Cambridge University Library, co-ordinating staff training across all Cambridge University libraries. He currently lives in Leeds.
His first book, Fire Stations (Anvil Press), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2003. In August 2010 his poem ‘Treasure Island’ won first prize in the Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition. Donut Press published a signed and numbered pamphlet, Apocrypha, in 2011, and his collection, The Wilderness Party, was published by Bloodaxe in 2015 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His latest collection is The Voyage of St Brendan from Bloodaxe Books, 2021.