Mark Ford

Mark Ford was born in 1962 in Nairobi and grew up in various cities around the world, though he attended school in London. He earned a BA and a PhD from the University of Oxford. From 1983 to 1984, he was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University. 

Ford has published five collections of poetry: Enter, Fleeing (Faber & Faber, 2018); Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2014); Six Children (Faber & Faber, 2011); Soft Sift (Harcourt, 2001); and Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992). In 2012, he released a translation of French poet Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa (Princeton University Press). Ford is also the editor of the anthology London: A History in Verse (Harvard University Press, 2012). 

Additionally, Ford has published five works of prose, including This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray (Eyewear Publishing, 2014), which won the Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism; and a biography of Roussel titled Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, first published in Britain by Faber & Faber in 2000, then by Cornell University Press the following year. 

Ford was a visiting lecturer at the University of Kyoto from 1991 to 1993. He currently teaches English at University College London.