Robin Robertson

Robin Robertson is a Scottish poet born in Scone, Perthshire in 1955. He studied at Aberdeen University and has worked for many years as a senior editor at Jonathan Cape. His poetry collections include A Painted Field (1997), Slow Air (2002), Swithering (2006), The Wrecking Light (2010), and Hill of Doors (2013), all of which received major prizes. The Long Take (2018, Picador) is his verse novel — part poetry collection, part narrative fiction — following Walker, a Nova Scotian D-Day veteran with PTSD who makes his way across post-war America, finding in the urban landscapes of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco both his own dissolution and a kind of witness. Written partly in prose and partly in verse, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2019. Robertson's poetry is known for its classical austerity, its mythological resonance, and its unflinching confrontation with violence and loss. He has translated Euripides and Ovid.