Iain Galbraith, born in Glasgow in 1956, grew up in the west of Scotland and studied Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at the universities of Cambridge, Freiburg and Mainz. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, PN Review, Edinburgh Review, New Writing, Best Scottish Poems and, in German translation, in the German and Austrian journals Akzente and Manuskripte.

His most recent book publications include an anthology of Austrian poetry in English, The Night Begins with a Question (Carcanet/Scottish Poetry Library, 2007), and a substantial anthology of 20th-century Scottish poetry in German, Beredter Norden. Schottische Gedichte seit 1900 (Edition Rugerup, 2011). Recent translated volumes of poetry include Alfred Kolleritsch’s Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2007), John Burnside’s Versuch über das Licht (Hanser, 2011), and W. G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001 (Hamish Hamilton, 2011). He has edited Michael Hamburger’s essays and poetry in German translation, in the volumes Pro Domo (2007) and Letzte Gedichte (2009), published by Folio Verlag in Vienna, and his German versions of British and Irish plays have been performed at more than a hundred theatres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He is a winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize, awarded jointly by the British Centre for Literary Translation and British Comparative Literature Association.