Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell, a poet, playwright, critic, and teacher, was born in 1962 in Hertfordshire City, England, to Welsh parents. He studied English at Oxford University and both poetry and theatre with Derek Walcott at Boston University. 

Maxwell’s first book of poetry, Tale of the Mayor’s Son (Bloodaxe Books) was published in 1990. Since then, he has published numerous other collections, including Out of the Rain (Bloodaxe Books, 1992), for which he received a Somerset Maugham Award; Rest for the Wicked (Bloodaxe Books, 1995), which was short-listed for both the Whitbread Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize; and The Breakage (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), which was short-listed for both the T. S. Eliot and the Forward Poetry Prizes.

Maxwell is also the author of New and Selected Poems (Arrowsmith Press, 2024); How the Hell Are You (Picador/Pan Macmillan, 2020); Pluto (Picador, 2013); One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011); Hide Now (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), which was short-listed for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize; The Sugar Mile (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), a narrative collection; The Nerve (Picador, 2002), which won the 2004 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Time’s Fool: A Tale in Verse (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times; and The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990–1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), also selected as by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year.

Maxwell also published On Poetry (Harvard University Press, 2013), a critical guidebook, and edited The Poetry of Derek Walcott: 1948–2013 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014). He has written and staged several plays in London and New York. In 1997, he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

About Maxwell’s work, the poet Joseph Brodsky has said,

Glyn Maxwell covers a greater distance in a single line than most people do in a poem. There is an extraordinary propulsion in his work, owing in part to his tendency to draw metaphor from syntax itself. He is a poet of immense promise and unforgettable delivery.

Maxwell served as poetry editor of The New Republic from 2001 to 2007. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s The Verb, hosted by Ian McMillan and publishes reviews in both the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. Maxwell is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Welsh Academy. He has taught at Amherst College, Columbia University, Princeton University, New York University, and the New School. He is head of studies for the MA program at The Poetry School at Somerset House. He lives in London.