Christopher Middleton
Photo of Christopher Middleton (right) & Marius Kociejowski by Tony Frazer, 2005.
Shearsman Titles
Palavers, and A Nocturnal Journal
About the author
Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and then taught at the University of Zürich, at King's College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe and many contemporaries, receiving several awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His poems, essays and selected translations are all published in the UK by Carcanet Press; his poems are published in the USA by Sheep Meadow Press. His most recent publications are: Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2008), The Anti-Basilisk (poetry, Carcanet Press, 2005—published as Tankard's Cat in the USA by Sheep Meadow), Of the Mortal Fire (poetry, Sheep Meadow, 2003), Crypto-Topographia (prose, Enitharmon Press, London, 2002), The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems (Carcanet / Sheep Meadow, 2001), Jackdaw Jiving: Selected Essays on Poetry and Translation (Carcanet, 1998), Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2000). Christopher Middleton lives in Austin, Texas.
Marius Kociejowski, who interviewed Christopher Middleton for the Palavers volume, and also contributed a personal memoir of the poet, was born in 1949. He lives in London, where he works as an antiquarian bookseller. His Greville Press booklet Coast won the Cheltenham Prize in 1991. He has subseqently published two collections of poems with Anvil Press Poetry, London: Doctor Honoris Causa (1993) and Music's Bride (1999), and a book of travels, The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool – A Syrian Journey (Sutton Publishing, 2004).