Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. A Painted Field won a number of awards on first publication in the UK, including the 1997 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. A Painted Field has subsequently been published in the States (Harcourt) and Italy (Guanda). A second collection, Slow Air, came out from Harcourt in 2003. His poetry appears regularly in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. In 2004 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.