Alastair Reid was born in 1926 in Galloway, and graduated from the University of St Andrews after war service in the navy. He has lived in Spain, France, Switzerland, the United States, and Central and South America, working as poet, translator and champion of South American literature, staff writer and South American editor of The New Yorker.

Alastair Reid’s collections include Whereabouts (1987), Weathering (1978) and To Lighten My House (1953). On the Blue Shore of Silence (HarperCollins, 2004) is a new selection of his translations of Neruda’s poems of the sea.

Find out more about Alastair Reid through the Scottish Poetry Library’s Poets A-Z.