Grevel Lindop

Grevel Lindop was born in Liverpool in 1948 and now lives in Manchester. Grevel had already begun to write poetry at the age of sixteen or seventeen, and so it was almost inevitable once he arrived at Oxford University in 1966 that his path would cross with that of Michael Schmidt who had started a year later in the same college. At that time, Carcanet was still an ‘Oxford and Cambridge’ student magazine. It later became a small press and Grevel Lindop’s first poetry publication, Against the Sea (1969), was one of the earliest pamphlets to be produced. His work was included in the second Faber Poetry Introduction anthology but Grevel Lindop remained loyal to Carcanet and published a further six volumes with them: Fools’ Paradise (1977), Tourists (1987), A Prismatic Toy (1991), Selected Poems (2000), Playing With Fire (2006) and Luna Park (2015). Aside from poetry, Grevel has written a biography of Thomas De Quincey called The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Oxford University Press, 1981), A Literary Guide To the Lake District (Chatto and Windus, 1993), Travels on the Dance Floor (Deutsch, 2008), an account of a journey exploring the Latin American roots of salsa music and dancing, and Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (Oxford University Press, 1995). He has also acted as editor on many publications, including British Poetry Since 1970 (Carcanet 1995, jointly edited with Michael Schmidt), Robert Graves’s The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Carcanet, 1997) and The Works of Thomas De Quincey (21 vols; Pickering and Chatto, 1999-2003).

In 1971, Grevel began a long teaching career at Manchester University starting as a lecturer at the young age of twenty-two and rising to Professor of Romantic and Early Victorian Studies before he left in 2001. He is currently writing a new collection of poems and a book about W. B. Yeats.