W.N. Herbert
Author photo by Stephanie R Mickler,
courtesy of
Bloodaxe Books.
Shearsman Titles
Sailor's Home (anthology)
About the author
W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1961. He studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he did a BA in English Literature and then a D.Phil. His thesis was published as To Circumjack MacDiarmid (OUP, 1992). He writes poetry in both English and Scots. His verse was described, memorably, by Fiachra Gibbons in The Guardian as 'a weird mix of Desperate Dan, MacDiarmid and Dostoyevsky'. Forked Tongue, his 1994 collection, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize. The Laurelude (1998) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His most recent collections The Big Bumper Book of Troy and Bad Shaman Blues appeared in 2002 and 2006 respectively. Herbert is also the co-editor of the anthology Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (2002). He is Senior Lecturer in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.