C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936, and lives in Normandy, France, and Princteon, USA. He has published a dozen books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems (1995), The Vigil (1997), Repair (1999) and The Singing (2003) – all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations – followed by Collected Poems (2006), Wait (2010) and Writers Writing Dying (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA, 2012; Bloodaxe Books, 2013), another Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987, Repair was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and The Singing won the National Book Award for 2003. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He published a memoir, Misgivings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. He has published two books of essays, Poetry and Consciousness (University of Michigan Press, 1998), and In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and his book on Walt Whitman, On Whitman, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010.

He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.