Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism and poetic theory. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, and three Forward Prizes; he is the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions – with his second collection God’s Gift to Women (Faber & Faber, 1997) and Landing Light (Faber & Faber, 2003). He also been shortlisted for Nil Nil (1993) and 40 Sonnets (2015). His most recent collections are Zonal (2020) and The Arctic (2022). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. He is a Fellow of the English Association, the Royal Society of Literature, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.
This biography of Don Paterson is taken from the Faber & Faber website.
