Patrick Errington

Dr Patrick James Errington is a poet, translator, critic, and academic from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. His poems feature in magazines, journals, and anthologies around the world – including Poetry Review, Poetry International, The Cincinnati Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets, Poets.org, Oxford Poetry, Copper Nickel, West Branch, CV2, Passages North, Diagram, Cider Press Review, and Horsethief – and have received numerous international prizes, including The National Poetry Competition, the Wigtown Poetry Competition, The London Magazine Poetry Competition, the Flambard International Prize, the McLellan Poetry Prize, the Plough Prize, and the 2020 Callan Gordon/Scottish New Writers Award. Patrick is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Glean (ignitionpress, 2018) and Field Studies (Clutag Press, 2019), and the collection, the swailing (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023), which was shortlisted for Poetry Book of the Year in the Scottish National Book Awards and won the John Pollard International Poetry Prize from Trinity College Dublin. His French translation (with Laure Gall) of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphey’s The Hollow of the Hand, entitled Au creux de la main, was released by Éditions l’Âge d’Homme in 2017 and his English translations of Hamid Tibouchi's Veins (Broken Sleep Press) and E.M. Cioran's Notebooks (New York Review Books) are forthcoming.

A graduate of the University of Alberta (Bachelor of Arts, 2011) where he studied under  the late Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Patrick also holds an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in writing and literary translation from Columbia University (2015) and a PhD for his research in poetic theory and enactive hermeneutics from the University of St Andrews (2018).

Patrick is currently a lecturer in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. He has lectured on literature, literary theory, and creative writing at several other universities in Scotland, including Edinburgh Napier, the University of Dundee, and the University of St Andrews. His research, in collaboration with researchers in Psychology and Education, explores of reader 'mindset' influences the experience and understanding of poetic language, and how that reading might impact ecological thinking and mental health and wellbeing. This research is currently funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Carnegie Trust and in partnership with the National Literacy Trust, The Poetry Foundation, the Scottish Poetry Library, and app developer Playable Technology.