Robert Crawford

POEMS BIBLIOGRAPHY CRITICISM

Robert Crawford was born in Belshill, Lanarkshire, and studied at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, where he was a founding editor of the magazine Verse, in 1984. W. N. Herbert was a fellow student there, and together they published Sharawaggi, their joint book of poems in Scots (Polygon, 1990).

A prolific writer both of poetry and criticism, his literary history, Scotland’s Books (2007) won the Saltire Scottish Research Book of the Year Award and his biography of Robert Burns, The Bard (2009) won the overall Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal, and the Birth of Photography was published in 2011 and further recent prose books, Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination 1314-2014 (Edinburgh University Press) and the biography Young Eliot: From St Louis to ‘The Waste Land’ (Cape and Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was published in 2015.

Crawford has nine full collections of his own poetry and a selected poems (2005). Full Volume (Cape, 2008) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; four of his collections have been Poetry Book Society Recommendations and he has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards.

With Simon Armitage he edited The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998), and with Mick Imlah The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2000). In 2016 he edited The Book of Iona, published by Polygon.

More recently, he has collaborated with photographer Norman McBeath, whom he first worked with in 2011, to illustrate his translations of the ancient Greek poet, Simonides into Scots. They have since collaborated on Chinese Makars (2016), and Strath (2019), translating classical Chinese poetry into Scots. They have also produced a limited edition set of haiku and images titled Light Box (2015).

Crawford has served as a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the National Poetry Competition among others. From 2014-16 he led the Royal Society of Edinburgh-supported Arts and Humanities Research Network, ‘Loch Computer’.

Crawford is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy, he was Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews until his retirement, somewhat before he had intended, in 2020.

In 2021, he published Textual Nonsense, literary and poetical jokes and marginalia that, as the title suggests, largely miss the mark.

Selected Bibliography

Sterts and Stobies, with WN Herbert (Obog Books, 1985)
Severe Burns, with WN Herbert & David Kinloch (Obog Books, 1986)
Sharawaggi, with WN Herbert (Polygon,1990)
A Scottish Assembly (Chatto, 1990)
Talkies (Chatto & Windus, 1992)
Masculinity (Cape, 1996)
Impossibility, with artist Caroline Saltzwedel (Hamburg: Hirundo Press, 1998)
Spirit Machines (Cape, 1999)
The Tip of My Tongue (Cape, 2003)
A Gean Tree (Oxford Poetry Broadsides, 2005)
Selected Poems (Cape, 2005)
Full Volume (Cape, 2008)
Simonides, translations into Scots, with photographer Norman McBeath (Easel Press, 2011)
Testament (Cape, 2014)
Light Box, with photographer Norman McBeath (Easel Press, 2015)
Chinese makars: Du Fu – Li Bai – Wang Wei – Xue Tao, translations into Scots, with photographers Norman McBeath and John Thomson (Easel Press, 2016)
The Scottish Ambassador (Cape, 2018)
Strath, translations into Scots, with photographer Norman McBeath (Easel Press, 2019)
Textual Nonsense, A Four-Part Trilogy (Boiler House, 2021)

In notable anthologies:

New Chatto Poets: Number Two (Chatto & Windus, 1989)
Penguin Modern Poets 9: John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Kathleen Jamie (Penguin, 1996)
Dream State: New Scottish Poets (Polygon, 1994, revised, 2001)

Prose, criticism and as editor:

About Edwin Morgan, editor, with Hamish Whyte (Edinburgh University Press, 1990)
The Arts of Alasdair Gray, editor, with Thom Nairn (Edinburgh University Press, 1991)
The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot (Clarendon Press, 1991)
Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in 20th Century Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1993)
Reading Douglas Dunn Modern Scottish Writers, editor, with David Kinloch (Edinburgh University Press, 1993)
Liz Lochhead’s Voices (Edinburgh University Press, 1994)
Literature in Twentieth Century- Scotland A Select Bibliography (British Council Literature Department, 1995)
Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Edinburgh University Press, 1997)
The Scottish Invention of English Literature, editor (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945, editor, with Simon Armitage (Penguin, 1998)
The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, editor, with Mick Imlah (Penguin, 2000)
Scottish religious poetry from the sixth century to the present: an anthology, editor, with Meg Bateman and James McGonigal (Saint Andrew Press, 2000)
Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2000)
The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s (Oxford University Press, 2001)
‘Heaven-taught Fergusson’, Robert Burns’ favourite Poet, editor, (Tuckwell Press, 2003)
Apollos of the North: Selected Poems of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston, editor (Birlinn, 2006)
Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (Oxford University Press, 2006)
The Book of St Andrews: An Anthology (Polygon, 2007)
Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature (Penguin, 2007)
New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Editor (Birlinn, 2009)
The Best Laid Schemes: Selected Poetry and Prose of Robert Burns, editor, with Christopher MacLachlan (Princeton University Press, 2009)
The Bard- Robert Burns, A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2009)
The Beginning and End of the World: St. Andrews, Scandal, and the Birth of Photography (Birlinn, 2011)
On Glasgow and Edinburgh (Harvard University Press, 2013)
‘Glasgow: A Dear Green Place’ from Waiting for the Magic: The Photography of Oscar Marzaroli (Birlinn, 2013)
Bannockburns- Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314-2014 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014)
Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land (Cape, 2015)
The Book of Iona: An Anthology (Polygon, 2016)
Curriculum Violette- A commemoration of Violette Szabo, with Paul Malgrati (Molecular Press, 2021)