Don Paterson

POEMS MULTIMEDIA BIBLIOGRAPHY CRITICISM LEARNING RESOURCES

Born in Dundee in 1963, Don Paterson left school to pursue a career in music, living mostly in London and Brighton. His first book Nil Nil was published to acclaim in 1993, and in the same year he returned to Scotland as Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee. His poetry collections have gone on to win many significant awards. In 1997 he became poetry editor at Picador Macmillan, a role he demitted in 2023. An accomplished jazz guitarist, he has worked solo and with the jazz-folk ensemble, Lammas; he continues to work as a musician. For many years he taught in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, where he remains Professor Emeritus. His other work includes The Eyes, versions of Antonio Machado; Orpheus, a version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus, and three books of aphorism. He also writes criticism and poetic theory, and has edited several anthologies.

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Selected Bibliography

Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993)
God’s Gift to Women (London: Faber, 1997)
The Eyes: a version of Antonio Machado (London: Faber, 1999)
Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003)
Orpheus: a version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus (London: Faber, 2006)
Rain (London: Faber and Faber, 2009)
Hiding in Full View (with Alison Watt) (Edinburgh: Ingleby Gallery, 2011)
Selected Poems (Faber, 2012)
40 Sonnets (Faber, 2015)
Zonal (Faber, 2020)
The Arctic (Faber, 2022)

Aphorisms
The Book of Shadows (London: Picador, 2004)
The Blind Eye: a book of late advice (London: Faber and Faber, 2007)
The Fall at Home: new and collected aphorisms (Faber and Faber, 2019)

As editor
101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)
Last Words: new poetry for the new century (with Jo Shapcott) (London: Picador, 1999)
Robert Burns: poems selected by Don Paterson (London: Faber and Faber, 2001)
New British Poetry (with Charles Simic) (New York: Graywolf Press, 2004)
Train Songs (with Sean O’Brien) (London: Faber and Faber, 2013)
The Zoo of the New (with Nick Laird) (Penguin, 2016)
The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse edited by Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie and Peter Mackay (Canongate, 2021)

Selected Biography & Criticism

Criticism
Don Paterson by Roderick Watson in The Literature of Scotland: the twentieth century 2nd ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Don Paterson and poetic autonomy by Scott Hames in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature edited by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh University Press, 2007),
Don Paterson by Alan Gillis in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry edited by Matt McGuire and Colin Nicholson (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)
Don Paterson: the music of consciousness by Attila Dósa in Beyond identity: new horizons in modern Scottish poetry (Rodopi, 2009)
Don Paterson: contemporary critical essays edited by Natalie Pollard (Edinburgh University Press, 2014)
Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: a new commentary (London: Faber and Faber, 2010)
The Poem: lyric, sign, metre (Faber, 2018)
Don Paterson: Writers and Their Work by Ben Wilkinson (Liverpool University Press, 2021)