Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including two major biographies of T.S. Eliot- Young Eliot and Eliot After The Waste Land. Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, he is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. His poetry has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and he has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards as well as the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.
Vivid, nuanced and joyous... [The Scottish Ambassador is] a marvellous and marvelling collection, at once worldly and homely. * Times Literary Supplement * The book is trying to sing Scotland, but also Scotland as part of a much wider realm... Cultural references range from Madame Butterfly to ancient Assyria. If it's a vision of Scotland, it's a complex, expansive one. -- Susan Mansfield * Scotsman * Robert Crawford's collection [The Scottish Ambassador] is a book of celebrations... The long, unrhymed lines fizz with welcoming particulars and jolly japes. -- Peter Scupham * Literary Review * Crawford knows when to be piano and when to ring out the forte... This is an exceptionally fine collection, and a model for how to nuance the stylistic shifts. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotsman *