PETER RILEY was born in 1940 near Manchester. He studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the universities of Keele and Sussex. He has taught at the University of Odense (Denmark) and since 1975 has lived as a freelance writer and poetry bookseller, from which he retired in 2008. He lived in the Peak District for ten years and now lives in Cambridge, with regular excursions to Transylvania, in the music and society of which he has taken a special interest.