David Kinloch was born in Glasgow in 1959 and educated at Glasgow and Oxford Universities. For many years a teacher of French language and literature, he now teaches creative writing and Scottish literature in the English Studies Department of the University of Strathclyde. His publications include four books of poetry, Dustie-Fute (Vennel Press, 1992), Paris-Forfar (Polygon, 1994), Un Tour d'Ecosse (Carcanet, 2001) and In My Father's House (Carcanet, 2005), studies of French writers and work in the field of Translation Studies. He was a recent recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award.
Kinloch was part of a group of Scottish writers including Robert Crawford, who met at Oxford University in the 1980s and who then went on to publish their own work, edit that of the others and perform together. He was for many years known as one of the editors of the influential magazine Verse. He moved on in the early nineties to editing Southfields with Richard Price.
By this time he had published a number of small pamphlets and become identified with a group known as the Informationists, who included Peter McCarey and Alan Riach among their numbers. The Informationists, as their name implied, were interested in the aesthetics of information, and were influenced by MacDiarmid’s later ‘poetry of fact’. Other influences include the New York poet Frank O’Hara, about whom he has written powerfully and sensitively.
Kinloch’s interest in French writing and his continually-developing exploration of gay sensibility mean he produces a stylistically diverse, emotionally direct body of writing incorporating the prose poem, Scots, and the use of unusual historical perspective to produce a richly literate work, at once erotically charged and shot through with both poignancies and irony.
Bibliography
Dustie-fute Vennel Press, Staines 1992
Paris-Forfar Polygon, Edinburgh 1994
Un Tour D'Ecosse Carcanet, Manchester 2001
In My Father's House Carcanet, Manchester 2005
The Thought and Art of Joseph Joubert 1754-1824 Clarendon, Oxford 1992
Reading Douglas Dunn Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1992 (co-edited with Robert Crawford
Talking Verse: Interviews with Poets Verse, St. Andrews and Williamsburg 1995 (co-edited with Henry Hart and Richard Price)
Situating Mallarme Peter Lang AG 2000 (with Gordon Millan)
La Nouvelle Alliance: Influences francophones sur la littérature ecossaise moderne Ellug, Grenoble 2000 (co-edited with Richard Price)
Links
Carcanet
David Kinloch on Carcanet's website
Language: English
Scottish Poetry Library
David Kinloch at the Scottish Poetry Library
Language: English
Poetry Society
David Kinloch reviews Edwin Morgan
Language: English
