W.N. ('Bill') Herbert is an emeritus professor at Newcastle University, where he taught Creative Writing for many years, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. He was Grasmere’s inaugural Wordsworth Fellow in 1998, and Dundee's first Makar or city laureate (2013-18). He publishes mainly with Bloodaxe, starting with Forked Tongue, a New Generation title, in 1994. He has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, among others, and in 2014 was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize. He co-edited Strong Words: modern poets on modern poetry (2000) with Matthew Hollis, and Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (2012) with Yang Lian. Recent volumes include The Wreck of the Fathership (2020), Unselected Poems, and The Iconostasis of Anxiety (both 2024).