Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Merwin, William Stanley, 1927-2019, poet, translator, and editor
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Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
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Description area
Dates of existence
1927-2019
History
W.S. Merwin is Poet Laureate of the United States for 2010-11. He has been awarded most of the principal prizes in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the Bollingen Prize and the Tanning Prize and a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Bloodaxe published his Selected Poems in 2007, prior to which his poetry had been unavailable in Britain for over 35 years. As well as being an internationally renowned poet, W.S. Merwin is the author of many classic translations, including editions of Neruda, Dante, The Song of Roland, The Poem of the Cid, and (from Bloodaxe) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His latest titles from Bloodaxe are Selected Poems (2007) and The Shadow of Sirius (2009), which won him his second Pulitzer Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Neil Astley's anthology Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions: 3 (2007) includes a selection of his poems with extracts from interviews and other prose. Born in New Jersey City in 1927, he taught at several universities, and now lives on the Pacific island of Maui, where he tends to his writing and to his garden of rare and endangered palm trees.