Robert Crawford was born in Belshill, Lanarkshire in 1959, and studied at Glasgow and Oxford, where W N Herbert was a fellow student - Sharawaggi, their joint book of poems in Scots, was published by Polygon in 1990. His collections of poetry in English include A Scottish Assembly (Chatto, 1990), Spirit Machines (Cape, 1999), The Tip of My Tongue (Cape, 2003), his Selected Poems (Cape, 2005) and Full Volume (Cape, 2008), his latest. 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). A founding editor of the magazine Verse, he has served as a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Poetry Competition, and other awards.

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Featured poem

In Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh

Eyeing an African carved leaning tower
Of people holding one another up
For dear life, childishly I bless that stranger

Who in a year of cruel surgical strikes,
Did a good job, the on-call Muslim surgeon
Who cut the cancer from my mother’s face.

Robert Crawford © 2005
from The Hand That Sees (Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh / Scottish Poetry Library, 2005)