Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 in Lisgoold, County Cork. He has published four collections of poems with Faber and Faber: A Word from the Loki (1995), a PBS Choice and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; Floods (2000), shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; The Holy Land (2007), which received the Michael Hartnett Award; and The Water Stealer (2013), also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Among his other books are The Finest Music: Early Irish Lyrics (Faber, 2014) and A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (Faber, 2000). He co-edited Wild Reckoning (2004), an anthology of ecological poems, with John Burnside, and Dark Matter: Poems of Space (2008), with astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Confidential Reports, his translations of Maltese poet Immanuel Mifsud, appeared in 2005. He has also published a collection for children, The Moon Has Written You a Poem, adapted from the Portuguese of José Letria. He was Editor of Poetry London from 2005 to 2009 and became Editor of The Poetry Review in 2013. He has taught at Imperial College and Goldsmiths College. He is currently Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam University.