Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962, and was educated at Methodist College Belfast. He has held teaching positions at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol, and since 1999 he has been Christopher Tower Student in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, Oxford, where he is also Professor of British and Irish Poetry. He is well-known as a poetry critic, and has published four books about verse from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as an edition of the poetry of Louis MacNeice. He lives with his family in Oxfordshire, and he is working on W. B. Yeats’s Complete Poems for the Longman Poets series.