David Constantine

David Constantine was born in Salford, 1944, and was until 2000 Fellow in German at the Queen's College, Oxford. He is now a freelance writer, translator, and co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. His poetry - often drawing upon Greek mythology or biblical narrative - includes Watching for Dolphins (1983, winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award), Something for the Ghosts (2002, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize), and a Collected Poems (2004). Translations include Friedrich Holderlin's Selected Poems (which won the 1997 European Poetry Translation prize),  prose and drama by Kleist and Brecht, and  Goethe's Faust (to be published by Penguin in July). He has published a novel Davies (1985, Southern Arts Literature Prize), a volume of short stories Under the Dam (Comma Press, 2005), and a biography of Sir William Hamilton, Fields of Fire (2001).

''Constantine's peculiar vision is an uneasy blend of the exquisite and the everyday...the beatific, the ordinary (...) are almost indistinguishable. Overwhelmingly, the poems are intelligent and well-turned, setting out the tensions between innocence and experience with fine control.'' Times Literary Supplement.

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