Geoff Ward was born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1954. He spent most of the 1970s in Cambridge, studying English at Clare College and then teaching. Here he met John Wilkinson, Rod Mengham and Tom Raworth, and was taught by JH Prynne. He lectured in English and American Literature at Liverpool University, where he wrote his first critical monograph Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (1993) which established his reputation as an authority on John Ashbery. After a year in Japan (1994) he was Professor of English and subsequently Deputy Principal at the University of Dundee, working for a year in the USA as a Leverhulme Fellow. He has given numerous readings of his poetry in Europe, the USA and Japan. From 2007 until 2012 he was Vice Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London. Now Principal of Homerton College, University of Cambridge, he is a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford. He also writes fiction and broadcasts occasionally for BBC Radio 3 on American writers, most recently David Foster Wallace.