About the Author

Michael Longley has published eight collections of poetry, including Gorse Fires, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan, which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. In 2001 Longley received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He and his wife, the academic and critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.