Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell (born in 1962) is a British poet, playwright, librettist, and lecturer.

Though his parents are Welsh - his mother Buddug-Mair Powell (b. 1928) acted in the original stage show of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in the West End and on Broadway in 1956 - Maxwell was born and raised in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire.

His father James Maxwell (b. 1928) is a retired industrial chemist. Maxwell has two brothers, Alun (b. 1960), and David (b. 1964). His cousin Kerry Lee Powell is a noted Canadian writer.

He studied English at Worcester College, Oxford. He began an MLitt there, but in 1987 moved to America to study poetry and drama with Derek Walcott at Boston University. He returned to the UK and began publishing poetry in the 1990s.

After his marriage and the birth of his daughter Alfie, he moved with his family to the USA, living and teaching at first in Amherst, Massachusetts, and then in New York City, during which time he taught at Columbia, Princeton, NYU and the New School. He returned to the UK in 2006.

In the years 1991, 1993 and 1995, Maxwell staged performances of his plays in his parents' garden in Welwyn Garden City. These were featured in the national press and on radio.

His three earliest collections of poetry, Tale Of The Mayor's Son (1990), Out of the Rain (1992), Rest For The Wicked (1995) are collected as The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (2000). The Nerve won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2004. All his other collections of poems - The Breakage, Hide Now and Pluto - have been shortlisted for either the T.S.Eliot, Forward, or Costa (formerly Whitbread) Prizes.

In 1994 he was named one of the New Generation poets and he received the E. M. Forster Award in 1997. His most recent collections are One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems and Pluto. His work appears in several anthologies of the best of 20th century poetry.

In 2014 he edited a collected edition of the poems of Derek Walcott, The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013.

His critical guidebook On Poetry (Oberon Books, 2012) was described by Adam Newey in The Guardian as 'the best book about poetry I've ever read' and by Hugo Williams in The Spectator as 'a modern classic'.

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