Peter McCarey was born in Paisley and brought up in Glasgow, studied and worked in Europe, Africa and Asia, and lives in Geneva. He graduated from Oxford with a degree in Russian and French, and has a PhD from Glasgow University in Russian and Scottish literature. He has worked as a freelance translator, and for many years as Head of Language Services for the World Health Organisation. McCarey has five slim volumes of poetry, brought together in Collected Contraptions, published by Carcanet in 2011. As a poet he stands as one of the Scottish Informationists; his major work has been the Syllabary, an epic project which attempted a poem for every syllable in the English language. He has published a comparative study of Hugh MacDiarmid and five Russian poets, and his latest book, Find an Angel and Pick a Fight, is a collection of essays on ‘poetry, philosophy and the mysteries and methods of translation’.
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