Mark Ford was born in 1962 in Nairobi, Kenya. He grew up in a number of countries, including Nigeria, America, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and Bahrain. He has written four collections of poetry: Landlocked (1992), Soft Sift (2001), Six Children (2011), and Enter, Fleeing (2018). He is also the author of Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000), the first English-language biography of the French poet, playwright and novelist Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). His translation of Roussel’s Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique for a parallel text edition published in 2011 was a runner-up for that year’s PEN Translation Awards. Mark Ford’s other publications include the anthology London: A History in Verse (2012), Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (2016), and three collections of essays: A Driftwood Altar (2005), Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (2011), and This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray (2014), which was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books.