Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001. Of Mutability, published in 2010, won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.