Professor Michael Schmidt FRSL, MA, OBE
Professor of Poetry
- Poetry
- History of the Novel
- Creative Writing
- Literary Transmission
Room 101, 5 University Gardens
telephone: 0141 330 6877
e-mail: m.schmidt@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
Biography
Michael Schmidt is Professor of Poetry and Convener of the Creative Writing Programme, which runs from the Undergraduate Honours Option to the PhD with taught elements and includes Glasgow's well-known MLitt.
Born in Mexico in 1947, he was educated at Harvard and Wadham College, Oxford. He is editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited (www.carcanet.co.uk), the literary publishing house dealing in particular with poetry, and he is general editor of PN Review (www.pnreview.co.uk), the literary journal now in its fourth decade, which appears six times a year and is edited from the Edwin Morgan Creative Writing Centre. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association, a member of the Advisory Board (Literature) of the British Council, and a member of L'Académie Européene de Poésie.
He has written two novels, several books of poems including most recently The Resurrection of the Body, and has translated from the Nahuatl and from the Spanish. As a literary historian he has writen Lives of the Poets (1999), Lives of the Ancient Poets (2004) and the ongoing series The Story of Poetry. He is currently writing Lives of the Novelists. He has compiled, as well as many introductory anthologies of new poets' work, several educational and representative anthologies, notably The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English.
His most recent editorial work has been on the Collected Poems of Elizabeth Jennings and The Telling by Laura Riding. Other editorial work has included (for Penguin) introductions to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and afterwords to Lyrical Ballads, Lamia and Other Poems, Barrack Room Ballads etc.
With Dr Chris McCully, he is a founder and Director of the Modern Literature Archive project, John Rylands University Library, Manchester.