Angela Leighton was born in Wakefiled to a Yorkshire father and a Neapolitan mother. As a result, doubleness has always been a part of her life, whether thinking in English or Italian, as a literary critic or a poet. She has published many works of criticism, most recently Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018), as well as four volumes of poetry: A Cold Spell (2000), Sea Level (2006), The Messages (2012), and Spills (2016), which includes memoir, fiction and translations from the Italian.