Iain Higgins is a writer, translator, critic, and teacher. His books include Then Again (poems), The Invention of Poetry (a translation of Polish poet Adam Czerniawski’s selected poems), The Book of John Mandeville (a translation of a fictional medieval travel book about the East), and Writing East: The “Traves”’ of Sir John Mandeville (an academic study). His poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, and his creative nonfiction has appeared in Maisonneuve. He is currently finishing a new book of poems and working on a novel. He teaches in the English department and in the Medieval Studies Program at UVic.

Like John Milton, with whom otherwise he has almost nothing in common, he believes in reading promiscuously, in spending time with old books as well as new ones. Over the years these have included such pleasurable encounters as Austen’s Persuasion, Bunting’s Briggflatts, Ford’s The Good Soldier, King’s Green Grass Running Water, Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, Milosz’s From the Rising of the Sun, Stan Persky’s The Short Version, Sappho’s lyrics, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Rosemarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles, Woolf’s Between the Acts, and most things by Octavio Paz and Annie Dillard.