As Best We Can

Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent and educated locally and at the University of Leeds. He taught American Studies at the University College of Wales Aberystwyth and for a year (1970-71) at Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY. In 1973 he moved to Manchester Polytechnic, later Manchester Metropolitan University, from where he retired as Professor of English in 2009. In 1984 he was Judith Wilson Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge. He has translated Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, Pierre Corneille and Bernard-Marie Koltès for the RSC, the BBC and the Actors' Touring Company. He was northern theatre critic for The Independent newspaper for eleven years. His literary criticism includes Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (MUP) and Poetry the Basics (Routledge). Jeffrey Wainwright lives in Manchester and for part of the year in Umbria.

'Jeffrey Wainwright's work is among the most interesting of any poet now writing. Although he has an admiring readership, he has stayed under the radar much of the time, pursuing a line of poetic inquiry that links him to writers as various as Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, Tony Harrison and even Charles Tomlinson (who like Wainwright was from the Potteries) - all of them in various ways historian-poets. Wainwright's particular imprint is a richly charged austerity, an ostensible plainness that, like a powerful magnet, summons suggestions to the page and the ear. Part of the pleasure of reading his work is trying to establish how he does so much by such apparently unspectacular means. An equally unobtrusive formal assurance has much to do with his success.' - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian