Sean O’Brien’s eleventh book of poems, Embark, appeared in 2022. His work has received awards including the Somerset Maugham, the E.M Forster, the Forward Prize (three times), the T.S. Eliot prize, and most recently the Beijing Literature and Arts Network Award for lifetime achievement. His work has been widely translated. Among his own translations are Dante’s Inferno and the poems of the Kazakh national poet Abai Kunanbayuli. In 2023 his chapbook Impasse: for Jules Maigret was published by Hercules Editions and his pamphlet Otherwise by Dare-Gale Press. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.