Robyn Bolam (formerly Marion Lomax) was born in 1953 in Newcastle, and grew up in Northumberland. She gained her doctorate from the University of York in 1983, and her study of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was published by CUP in 1987. She has edited four plays by John Ford (OUP, 1995) and The Rover by Aphra Behn (New Mermaids, 1995), and is now Professor of English at St Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill, where she has taught since 1987. In 1981 she received a Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and won first prize in the Cheltenham Festival poetry competition. Her libretto for the opera Beyond Men and Dreams (composer Bennett Hogg) was performed by the Royal Opera House Garden Venture in 1991. In 1993 she held a Hawthornden International Fellowship. She has published three books of poems with Bloodaxe, The Peepshow Girl (1989) and Raiding the Borders (1996), both under her former name of Marion Lomax and New Wings: Poems 1977-2007 (2007), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her anthology Eliza's Babes: Four Centuries of Women's Poetry in English was published by Bloodaxe in 2003.