Harry Guest was born in Penarth in 1932. After reading Modern Languages at Cambridge, he wrote a thesis on Mallarmé at the Sorbonne. Between 1966 and 1972 he lectured at Yokohama National University. He is an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Exeter and, in 1998, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Plymouth.A House Against the Night was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His translations of Victor Hugo won an Honourable Mention in the European Poetry Translation Award.Reviewing his first novel in the Daily Telegraph, Martyn Goff referred to his "wonderful feels for words". Terry Eagleton, in Stand, described his poetry as "surprising, complex and unclichéd". His work has been braodcast and televised in several countries; his poems have been translated into French, Japanese, Italian and Estonian.
