Robert Crawford

Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St Andrews University, where his teaching interests include Scottish Literature, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, T. S. Eliot, and Creative Writing. He has taught there since 1989 having previously worked at the universities of Oxford and Glasgow. In 2004 he delivered the Smithies Lectures at Balliol College, Oxford and more recently lectured at Yale and Berkeley, as well as in France, Germany and in the Czech Republic. Robert received his MA from Glasgow University and his DPhil from Oxford.

He is a founding Fellow of the English Association and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. An acclaimed and award-winning poet in both English and Scots (Sharawaggi, Polygon 1990), Robert is also a highly respected poetry editor. With Simon Armitage he edited The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998), with Mick Imlah The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2000) and with Christopher MacLachalan The Best Laid Schemes: Selected Poetry and Prose of Robert Burns (Polygon, 2008). As the sole editor his work includes New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Polygon, 2008), Heaven-Taught Fergusson (Tuckwell, 2003), The Book of St Andrews (Polygon, 2005) and Apollos of the North (Polygon, 2006).

Robert is a founding editor of the magazine Verse and has served as a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Poetry Competition, amongst others.