Stephen Romer

Stephen Romer is a poet, a translator, a critic and an editor. His fifth collection, which is also a Selected Poems, Set Thy Love in Order, reaffirms his adherence to the art of the lyrical, text-based poem as a concentrated act of thought and feeling. He has indulged the dangerous art of love poetry, and several of his poems seek remedies from that state in forms of spiritual aspiration, often ruefully doomed to failure. His fourth collection, Yellow Studio (2008), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, contains a verse memoir of his father, based on the latter’s early diaries, in a variation of life-writing. His poems are frequently in tacit dialogue with, or at a slight angle to, the writers of the past. 

Stephen has also pursued a career as a translator from the French. He has edited two anthologies, including Faber’s 20th-Century French Poems (2002). More recently he has published French Decadent Tales (OUP World Classics, 2013) and The Arrière-pays (Seagull, 2012), a visionary prose text by Yves Bonnefoy, whose fusion of art history, cultural memory and autobiography received wide critical notice.  

Stephen has taught for many years at the University of Tours, and lived in the Loire Valley. He has published widely on aspects of French and British Modernism, producing chapters in academic books, and reviews for the Guardian and the TLS. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has served as a judge for many competitions, including the Stephen Spender Prize for Translation.