Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, and then taught at the University of Zurich, at King's College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Holderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. Over the last two decades Carcanet has published six books of his poems, one book of his experimental prose and two volumes of essays, as well as his Selected Writings and Faint Harps and Silver Voices, a collection of verse translations. He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, and in 2012 an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

August Kleinzahler says, Christopher Middleton is, and remains, a shocking man. 'One hardly knows where to begin...' There are few risks Middleton will not take in his poems. For six decades and more he has uncovered new dimensions in language. The last decade has been one of continuous discovery and extension. His English is an open medium, responding to Arabic, German, Spanish, French and other media. And English is eloquent in its nonsense as much as in its sense. His poems do not linger in the dank alleyways of self: he is always a maker and a shaper, of things that become durable resources for the reader, that refine and extend how we think, see and feel through formed language.