Michael Schmidt (poet)
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Michael Schmidt | |
|---|---|
| Born | 2 March 1947 |
| Alma mater | Harvard University Wadham College, Oxford |
| Occupation(s) | Poet, author, scholar and publisher |
| Known for | Founder of Carcanet Press and of PN Review |
| Website | www |
Michael Schmidt OBE[1] FRSL[2] (born 2 March 1947)[3] is a Mexican-British poet, author, scholar and publisher.
Schmidt was born in Mexico City, Mexico, on 2 March 1947. He was educated at The Hill School from 1959 to 1965 and earned an English-Speaking Union Scholarship to attend Christ's Hospital School (1965–66). He studied at Harvard University and at Wadham College, Oxford University, subsequently settling in England.[4]
Career
Schmidt was Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University until 2014, Writer-in-Residence at St. John's College, Cambridge, from 2012 to 2015 and a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2017 to 2018. He is founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press and a founder (1973) and general editor of PN Review.[5]
A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (elected in 1993),[2] Schmidt was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2006 for services to poetry.[6] His literary career has been described as having "a strong sense of internationalism and cultural 'connectedness'".[4] Schmidt refers to himself in his 1998 book Lives of the Poets as "an Anglophone Mexican publisher".[4]
In 2006, Schmidt delivered the keynote address at the StAnza Poetry Festival, entitled "What, How Well, Why?: A leading poetry publisher wonders why criticism has got a bad name".[7]
Schmidt's 2014 book, The Novel: A Biography, is a loosely chronological history of the development of the novel.[8] The book aims to explore the relationships between great novelists, including views by other novelists, while avoiding literary critics who were not also writers.[9] In August 2015, Schmidt was one of 20 authors of Poets for Corbyn, an anthology of poems endorsing Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election.[10][11]
