Grevel Lindop

I was born in Liverpool and educated at Oxford, where I read English. In 1977 I published my first full-length collection of poems, Fools’ Paradise. That book has been followed by five other books of poems: Tourists (1987), A Prismatic Toy (1991), Selected Poems (2000); then – published by Wave Books in Australia – the first four sections of my long poem-in-progress on the life of the Buddha, Touching the Earth, and another collection of poems, Playing With Fire, from Carcanet Press in 2006. My new collection, Luna Park, was published by Carcanet in 2015.

In the late 1970s I became interested in Thomas De Quincey, ‘the English Opium-Eater’, essayist and friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. I wrote a biography of him, published in 1981 as The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. Later I edited his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings for the Oxford World’s Classics series in 1985, and later still I piloted The Works of Thomas De Quincey, a 21-volume complete edition of his writings, produced by a team of eleven editors under my direction and published in 2000-03.

Alongside this work I published in 1993 A Literary Guide to the Lake District, a systematic guide to the area’s literary connections from the earliest times to the present day. It won the ‘Lakeland Book of the Year’ award in 1994. It has been repeatedly updated, and a new edition was published by Sigma Press in 2015.

My travel book, Travels on the Dance Floor was chosen as a Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted as Authors’ Club Best Travel Book.

Mysterious Wisdom: The Spiritual Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats will be published by Oxford University Press in 2026.

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