Todd Swift

Todd Swift (born April 8, 1966) is a British-Canadian poet, university teacher, editor, critic, and publisher based in the United Kingdom.

Background

Swift was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada,^[1] and raised in Saint-Lambert, Quebec. He received a B.A. in English from Concordia University (Montreal) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. He became British on April 3, 2013, at Westminster Town Hall, Marylebone, London.

While attending university, Swift was one of Canada's most successful parliamentary debaters. He was President of the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate and twice won the award for Top Speaker at the McGill University Winter Carnival Debating Tournament, as well as many other awards. In Montreal, he also ran the international cabaret, Vox Hunt, which featured, among others, regular performances by Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright. As a young man, Swift was friends with a number of Canada's rising literary stars, including Misha Glouberman, Heather O'Neill, and David McGimpsey. Swift was also half of the electronic music-poetry duo Swifty Lazarus, also featuring composer-trombonist Tom Walsh. In the 1990s, Swift wrote hundreds of hours of television (mostly animation) for HBO, Paramount, Hanna-Barbera, Fox, Cinar and DIC Entertainment, and was story editor for many episodes of anime show Sailor Moon.^[2] He also worked for editor Ned Hartley at General Media, Inc. (Penthouse) for several years as a writer and editor of erotica.

Swift is the author of nine full trade collections of poetry, published in America, Canada, England and Ireland; his Selected Poems is from Marick Press, USA. He is also a prolific anthologist, and editor of other poets' work. His poems have been translated into Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Korean and Macedonian. He has written for a number of publications, poems and reviews appearing in journals such as Poetry, The Globe and Mail, Poetry London and The Guardian.

In 2004 he was Oxfam Great Britain's Poet-in-residence, running their poetry series in London, and editing books, a DVD and three CDs to help raise funds for the charity, retiring from this work in 2012. Swift is a tutor with The Poetry School. He was Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University, England 2006–2013, having previously lectured at Budapest University (ELTE), London Met, and Birkbeck. He also has taught at the University of Glasgow. He is a convert to Roman Catholicism.

From 2005 on Swift has run the literary blog Eyewear. The blog is archived by the British Library. He is Director and Publisher of the indie press Eyewear Publishing Ltd. which was founded in 2012. He has an entry in The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013) which seeks to list the most influential poets of the last 100 years writing in the English language.

In 2013 it was reported in the British media that Swift had liquids poured on him from the window of a London hotel, allegedly by at least one member of the famous boy band The Wanted.^[3][4]

Swift is to be the 2017–2018 Visiting Scholar/ Writer-in-residence for Pembroke College, Cambridge, England.

In July 2018, Swift was accused by the Society of Authors of imposing unfair contracts that forbade Eyewear Publishing authors from seeking help from the society. Swift stated that the contracts were negotiable and the particular clause could be removed if requested.^[5]

Bibliography

References

External links

• Blog