Paul Farley was born in Liverpool and lives in north Lancashire. He received the Somerset Maugham Award and a Forward Prize for his first collection of poems, and was Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1999. His second collection, The Ice Age, won the Whitbread Poetry Award, while his third, Tramp in Flames, was shortlisted for the Forward, Griffin and T.S. Eliot prizes. In 2009 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
