BIOGRAPHY

Author of more than 20 books of poetry, fiction and criticism, Tony Lopez was born in 1950 and grew up in Brixton, South London, where he was educated at local state schools. He began working as a freelance on short stories for newspapers and magazines in the early 1970s and published five crime and science fiction novels with New English Library between 1973 and 77, when he gave up writing fiction and went back to school. He attended the University of Essex (BA 1980) and Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge (PhD 1986). During the 1980s he made a series of performance art events that were staged in Cambridge, Liverpool, Edinburgh, London and Amsterdam. His most recent poetry books are Covers (Salt, 2007), False Memory (Salt, 2003) and Devolution (The Figures, 2000). His work is featured in many anthologies including The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008), Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Salt, 2004), Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2001), Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (Wesleyan University Press, 1999) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996). In 1990 he received a Blundell award from the Society of Authors for research on modern poetry, in 1996 a Wingate Scholarship for creative work in poetry, and in 2005 a Research Leave award for creative work in poetry from the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. His criticism includes two monographs, The Poetry of W.S. Graham (Edinburgh University Press, 1989) and Meaning Performance: Essays on Poetry (Salt, 2006), and the collection Poetry and Public Language (co-edited with Anthony Caleshu and published by Shearsman, 2007). He is well known as a poetry performer and has given readings throughout the UK, Europe and North America. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth where he was appointed the first Professor of Poetry in 2000.