Scottish poet Robert Crawford to read for Writing Program Reading Series Sept. 30

Scottish poet and scholar Robert Crawford will read from his work at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 30, for the Writing Program Reading Series at Washington University in St. Louis.

The reading is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, located on the second floor of Duncker Hall, in the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Hoyt and Brookings drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Crawford is the author of five poetry collections: A Scottish Assembly (1990), Talkies (1992), Masculinity (1996), Spirit Machines (1999) and The Tip of My Tongue (2003). He has published several volumes of literary criticism on Scottish literature and poetry and is co-editor of The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (with Simon Armitage, 1998) and The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (with Mick Imlah, 2000). In 1984, Crawford was a founder of the international magazine Verse and later served as poetry editor for the Edinburgh publisher Polygon.

“Like his critical prose, Crawford’s poetry describes what happens when poetry’s old languages of romantic and religious experience intervene in new worlds of technology and science,” said Marina MacKay, Ph.D., assistant professor of English in Arts & Sciences. “Witty and clear-sighted about what nationality might mean in an era of transnational opportunities and pressures, Crawford’s poetic version of Scotland as a marginalized territory and an old imperial sinner manages to be both introspective and internationalist.”

Crawford was born in Belshill, Lanarkshire, Scotland, in 1959, and educated at Glasgow University and at Oxford. A fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he is currently a professor of modern Scottish literature at the University of St. Andrews.

Crawford has twice won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and four of his collections have been Poetry Book Society Recommendations. In 1988 he won an Eric Gregory award from The Society of Authors in London. In 1994 he was one of 20 poets selected for the Poetry Society’s “New Generation Poets.”