Jamie McKendrick is one of Britain’s leading poets, and the foremost translator of Italian poetry into English in the UK. His translations include the anthology The Faber Book of Italian 20th-Century Poems (Faber & Faber, UK, 2004); The Embrace: Selected Poems by Valerio Magrelli (Faber & Faber, 2009), which was awarded the John Florio Prize for translation and published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux as a bilingual edition under the title Vanishing Points (2010); the bilingual edition Archipelago by Antonella Anedda (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) which won the John Florio Prize 2016 for translation from Italian; and two novels by Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, published by Penguin Classics.
Born in Liverpool in 1955, Jamie McKendrick is a freelance writer, poet and translator who has taught at the University of Salerno in Italy. He lives in Oxford. His own books of poetry include The Sirocco Room (1991); The Kiosk on the Brink (1993); The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and a Poetry Book Society Choice; Sky Nails: Poems 1979-1997 (2000); Ink Stone (2003), which was shortlisted for the 2003 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award; Crocodiles & Obelisks (2007), shortlisted for the Forward Prize; Out There (2012), winner of the Hawthornden Prize; Selected Poems (2016); and Anomaly (2018).
