‘Patrick Errington is a poet of loss and of the almost-but-never-quite-found. He shows us how, on the crest of emerging form and its dissolution, meaning flares intensely, piercingly.’
Jan Zwicky, winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry
‘[the swailing] is work of remarkable virtuosity which always grounds itself in emotion, in the hard-earned poetics of the heart.’
Professor Eoin McNamee, Chair of the 2024 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize (Vona Groarke, Alice Lyons, Tom Walker)
‘Like figures walking through the smoke from a burning field, Errington’s poems emerge with remarkable definition, clarity, and surprise.’
2022 Bronwen Wallace Award Jury, Tenille K. Campbell, Michael Prior, & Suzannah Showler
Dr Patrick James Errington is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and academic from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Glean (ignitionpress, 2018) and Field Studies (Clutag Press, 2019), and the collection, the swailing (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023) which was a finalist for the Scottish National Book Awards’ Poetry Book of the Year and won the 2024 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Patrick’s poems feature in magazines, journals, and anthologies around the world – including Poetry Review, Poetry International, The Cincinnati Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Best New Poets, Poets.org, Oxford Poetry, Copper Nickel, West Branch, CV2, Passages North, Diagram, Cider Press Review, and Horsethief – and have received numerous international prizes, including The National Poetry Competition, the Wigtown Poetry Competition, The London Magazine Poetry Competition, the Flambard International Prize, the McLellan Poetry Prize, the Plough Prize, the 2020 Callan Gordon/Scottish New Writers Award, and the Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writer’s Trust of Canada. Meanwhile, his French translation (with Laure Gall) of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphey’s The Hollow of the Hand, entitled Au creux de la main, was released by Éditions l’Âge d’Homme in 2017. Patrick is currently translating the French-Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran’s Notebooks: 1957–1975 for New York Review Books, carrying on the work of the late poet and translator Richard Howard, as well as the work of French-Algerian poet and painter Hamid Tibouchi.
A graduate of the University of Alberta (Bachelor of Arts, 2011), where he studied under the late Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Patrick holds an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in writing and literary translation from Columbia University (2015) and a PhD for his research in poetic theory and enactive hermeneutics from the University of St Andrews (2018).
Having taught at numerous institutions, including the Universities of St Andrews, Dundee, Edinburgh Napier, and Columbia, Patrick is now a Lecturer in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches literature and creative writing and is also the primary and co-investigator on several interdisciplinary research projects.
See Patrick’s University of Edinburgh profile page here.
See Patrick’s profile on the Scottish Poetry Library here.
NEWS
— THE SWAILING wins the Trinity College Dublin’s John Pollard International Poetry Prize for best first collection! See some announcement articles in the Irish Times and Quill&Quire.
— THE SWAILING named a finalist for the Trinity College Dublin’s John Pollard International Poetry Prize for best first collection! See the full stunning shortlist here.
—THE SWAILING is a finalist for Scotland’s National Book Awards – Poetry Book of the Year 2023! Check out the full list of astonishing finalists here.
— Review by Devki Panchmatia of THE SWAILING in Edinburgh’s Outcrop Poetry!
— Read Matthew Salyer on Errington’s THE SWAILING in Forbes!
— A first review of THE SWAILING on the Poetry Foundation website, written by the poet Rebecca Morgan Frank.
— If Fire, Then Bird announced as the WINNER of the 2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award! See interviews with the University of Edinburgh and Columbia University as well as stories from the CBC and Quill & Quire.
