Originally from Dundee, Scotland, Don Paterson has publsihed several volumes of poetry including Nil Nil (1993), which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; God’s Gift to Women (1997) which won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Landing Light (2003) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and an unprecedented second T.S. Eliot Prize; Rain. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2009., Winner of Forward Poetry Prize; Selected Poems, Faber & Faber, 2012, and 40 Sonnets, Faber & Faber, 2015,
He is also a transaltor and in his The Eyes (1999), he versions of poems by Spanish poet Antonio Machado.” His 2006 translation of Rilke; Sonnets to Orpheus, Orpehus (Faber 2006) was praised by poet Mark Doty for its success in capturing “an unsettling, destabilizing force.”
Paterson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, for his service to literature, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He joined the London publisher Picador as poetry editor and has also taught creative writing at University of St. Andrews and Dundee University. He continues to perform as a jazz guitarist and lives in Dundee, Scotland.