Christopher Middleton (1926–2015) was born in Truro, Cornwall. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and then taught at the University of Zürich, at King's College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe and many contemporaries, receiving several awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His poems, essays and selected translations are all published in the UK by Carcanet Press; his poems are published in the USA by Sheep Meadow Press, with assorted prose volumes appearing from Green Integer and the University of New Mexico Press. His later recent publications included: Nobody's Ezekiel (Hopewell Press, 2015), Collected Later Poems (Carcanet, 2014), Loose Cannons: Selected Prose (University of New Mexico Press, 2014); Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2008), Crypto-Topographia (prose, Enitharmon Press, London, 2002), The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems (Carcanet & Sheep Meadow Press, 2001), Jackdaw Jiving: Selected Essays on Poetry and Translation (Carcanet, 1998), Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2000).