Angela Leighton was born in Wakefield, educated in Edinburgh and Oxford, and has taught at the universities of Hull and Cambridge. The daughter of a Yorkshire (composer) father and a Neapolitan mother, she has always recognised her heritage of mixed languages and conflicting standpoints. Perhaps for this reason her work has always pushed at the boundaries of literary form. Her most recent critical work, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018), sets autobiographical creative prose alongside critical writing to suggest the connections between them, while her volume of poems, Spills (2016), interweaves memoir, short story and translation with original poetry. The permeable flow of the language, towards music on the one hand and other literatures on the other, lies at the heart of her own writing.

She has published poetry and short stories in many magazines, including the New Yorker, TLS, Poetry Chicago, Archipelago, The Dark Horse, and others. Something, I Forget is her sixth volume of poetry.