ABOUT MICHAEL 

Michael was schooled in Mexico, Pennsylvania and spent a form­ative year at Christ’s Hospital (Sussex). He was a sopho­more at Harvard before crossing the Atlantic to Oxford. In 1971 he gradu­ated from Wadham College, where he’d com­bined aca­demic work with his first efforts at pub­lishing poetry, his own and others’. He took over editing the magazine Carcanet. Out of that exper­i­ence sprung an eponymous poetry press – which has now spent over 50 years pub­lishing poets ancient, modern and con­tem­porary, anglo­phone and international.

It wasn’t pos­sible to make a living from poetry pub­lishing. Michael went north at the invit­a­tion of Professor C.B. Cox at the University of Manchester, taking the fledging press with him. He and Professor Cox estab­lished the lit­erary journal Poetry Nation Review. Beginning as a part-time lec­turer in 1971, Michael became Director of the University’s Poetry Centre in 1984, founding the Creative Writing School in 1993. He left to become Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1998, and Professor of English there.

During this period of estab­lishing Carcanet as a leading UK inde­pendent lit­erary pub­lisher, editing PN Review (as it became), teaching, broad­casting, theatre reviewing for the Independent and the Daily Telegraph, sitting on panels and com­mit­tees, in demand as a speaker at home and abroad, Michael was also writing. By the time Anvil Press pub­lished Choosing a Guest: new and selected poems in 1983, he had pub­lished six poetry col­lec­tions, The Colonist (1980) – his debut novel, fol­lowed by The Dresden Gate (1988) – and edited three poetry antho­lo­gies, three crit­ical antho­lo­gies, written a couple of intro­ductory books on British poetry and co-translated poems from Aztec, as well as trans­lating from Spanish his friend Octavio Paz’s essays On Poets and Poetry. Fortunately, he was away from the office one Saturday morning in 1996 when an IRA bomb des­troyed much of the Corn Exchange building from which Carcanet then operated.

Michael became Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow in 2006. While there he con­tinued writing his well-received lit­erary his­tories, which had begun with Lives of the Poets (2000), short­l­isted for the National Book Critics Circle Award (USA).The Story of Poetry in three volumes (2001–2008) was fol­lowed by Lives of the Ancient Poets: The Greeks (2004), and The Novel: a bio­graphy (2014). His time at Glasgow as Convenor of the Creative Writing M.Litt. (2006–14) was fol­lowed by periods as Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge (2014–16). Michael returned to teaching at the University of Manchester, as Professor of Poetry. He retired from teaching in 2025.

His recent pub­lic­a­tions include a col­lec­tion of poems, Talking to Stanley Moss on the Telephone (2021) and the widely acclaimed Gilgamesh: the life of a poem (2019). Michael spends his time in Manchester and Buxton, with regular visits to Oaxaca.

Download Michael’s CV here.