Robin Robertson was brought up on the north-east coast of Scotland. After taking degrees in Scotland and Canada he moved to London to begin a career in publishing, working at Penguin, Secker & Warburg and Jonathan Cape, where he is Associate Publisher. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Robertson’s books of poetry are A Painted Field (1997), Slow Air (2002), Swithering (2006), The Wrecking Light (2010), Hill of Doors (2013), Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems (2014) and The Long Take (2018).

In 2003 he edited Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame. He has published a number of books of translations: The Deleted World, a selection of new versions of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer (2006), Medea (2008) and the Bacchae (2014).

He has collaborated with Alasdair Roberts, most recently on Hirta Songs, a song-cycle about the island of St Kilda.

He has received a number of awards, including the Petrarca-Preis, the Cholmondeley Award, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and all three Forward Prizes. The Long Take has won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction and the Roehampton Poetry Prize, and was the first poem to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.