Robert Crawford was born in Lanarkshire and studied English at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. He has published eight collections of poetry with Cape, most recently The Scottish Ambassador (2018), as well as biographies of Robert Burns and T. S. Eliot.

His other books include works of literary criticism and literary history for CUP, EUP, Harvard UP, OUP, Penguin, and Princeton UP. Professor of Modern Scottish Literature and Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, he lives in Edinburgh. Textual Non Sense is his strangest book to date, but he hopes to write others that are at least as wayward.