Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962, and was educated at Methodist College, Belfast, and University College, Oxford. He has been writing poetry since his teens, and was himself a winner of national young poet competitions in 1978 and 1979. His first published poems were collected in the book Trio Poetry 3 (Blackstaff Press, 1982), and he was publishing poems in the national literary press while still an undergraduate. In 1983, he won Oxford's Newdigate Prize for poetry, and from 1983-5 he was co-editor of the literary magazine Oxford Poetry. In 1986, he was selected as one of the six writers (including Jo Shapcott and Adam Thorpe) featured in New Chatto Poets (Chatto and Windus). His first full collection of poems, Biting the Wax, was published in 1989.

Peter McDonald has been a university teacher of English for many years. He was Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, from 1988-92, and was Lecturer (and subsequently Reader) in English at the University of Bristol from 1992-99. In 1999, he became the first holder of the Christopher Tower Studentship (i.e. fellowship) and Tutorship in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, Oxford, also holding a lectureship in the English Faculty of Oxford University.

Peter McDonald has published several books of criticism, including Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997) and Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002), and is now completing Sound Intentions: Rhyme and Repetition from Wordsworth to Hardy. He has edited Louis MacNeice's Selected Plays (1993) and his Collected Poems (2007), and is now beginning work on a major three-volume edition of The Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats for the Longman Annotated English Poets series. More generally, Peter McDonald has been a prolific writer on modern and contemporary poetry, and his criticism appears regularly in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review and PN Review.

Peter McDonald's second collection of poetry was Adam's Dream (1996); Pastorals (2004) and The House of Clay (2007) followed this, and his fifth collection, Torchlight, was published by Carcanet in February 2011. He is working towards a volume of translations from ancient Greek, and his Collected Poems will be published in 2012.

In 1991, Peter McDonald published Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford University Press), and his critical and academic work on that poet has continued with his co-edited Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice (Oxford University Press, 1993), and a number of articles; he has re-edited, for Faber and Faber, MacNeice's Collected Poems (2007). More generally, he has been a prolific critic of modern and contemporary poetry, writing for both the national press in Britain and Ireland, and for poetry journals, such as Poetry Review, PN Review, Thumbscrew and Metre. He is widely regarded as one of the most incisive, and sometimes controversial, critics of contemporary poetry. His book Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 1997, paperback 2000) is a standard work on poets such as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Paul Muldoon. More recently, in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford University Press, 2002), he has challenged contemporary views of poetry and personality with new readings of Yeats, Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill.

Poems

• The dog
• Galatea
• The glen
• The glass harmonica
• At Castlereagh Church
• The blood-bruise
• The back roads
• San Domenico
• Three rivers