"I was born in 1963 in The Hague to an American mother and British father, the latter British by virtue of being a German-Jewish refugee in the UK from 1939 and throughout the war. We soon moved to Montreal where I spent most of my first twenty-four years, except for a year in Nigeria at 7 and a year in Edinburgh at 13. My father was an urban anthropologist and my mother a librarian. I grew up with three older sisters. My parents were politically left but in many ways I had a conventional North American middle-class upbringing and experience. Sports and crap tv played an enormous part in my life there. Somehow that changed. At McGill University I studied History and Literature and then I moved to London in 1988. I studied Librarianship at the University of London and then lived here for 10 years and it is here that I started writing poetry seriously. Hence most of my work has been published in the UK although that is a very small amount. I lived in Berkeley, California, from 1999-2003 and I have British, American, and Canadian citizenship, something which has given me a very strange sense of home. I consider myself Atlantic in basis but International in outlook. I've done plenty of odd jobs but most of the last decade I've worked as a librarian, currently at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. I doubt I'll ever leave this island. My religion is wonder, astonishment, possibility." (Christopher Gutkind)