Born in Bristol and educated at Oxford and London Universities. James Russell has spent most of his professional life teaching and researching in developmental psychology at Cambridge and is now a Fellow of Queens’ College.

He did not begin publishing poetry until the late 1990s, and now spends much of his time making up for lost time. He started writing in his teens by imitating Auden and then became aware of The New York School and of Tom Raworth quite accidentally via a Lee Harwood reading.

He doesn’t consider him-self a fully committed Modernist as he also feels at home with work that’s personal, heartfelt, and even nostalgic. While he loves and reveres the work of Ashbery and of Prynne, Russell would not be without Hugo Williams.