Harry Clifton was born in Dublin in 1952 but has lived in Africa and Asia as well as, more recently, in Europe. He has published six collections of poems including The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973-1988 (1992) and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007). On the Spine of Italy, his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, was published in 1999. For ten years he lived in France, publishing Le Canto d’Ulysse, his poems in French translation in 1996, and returning to Ireland in 2004. He lives in Dublin and is currently Ireland Professor of Poetry.