Robert Crawford was born in 1959 in a maternity hospital at Bellshill, Glasgow, as was his wife. Though they were not close at that time, they now have two children. Crawford lives north and east of almost everywhere, in St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, where he is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St Andrews University. Though he sometimes uses a spirit machine (or word-processor), essentially he lives in the bone-tools era, and is one of the few remaining poets of the western (in his case north-eastern western) world not to have his own private electronic army. His books of poems include A Scottish Assembly (Chatto, 1990), Talkies (Chatto, 1992), Masculinity (Cape, 1996), and Spirit Machines, (1999), as well as Sharawaggi (with W. N. Herbert, Polygon, 1990). In 1998 he co- edited The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945; with Mick Imlah he is now co-editing The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. He has written a lot of critical tomes too. A vast interview with him appears in Verse, Vol. 15, Numbers 1 and 2 (1998). No cassettes of his work are available. Nor are hair samples, web entanglements, or downloadable family snaps. He is not on e-mail. In fact, it is a miracle that he can even hold a pen.