Philip Gross was born in 1952 in Cornwall, and grew up in Plymouth. With a Cornish mother and an Estonian father, Gross has emerged as one of the greatest poetic voices of displacement, conveying what Terry Eagleton views as “lost bearings and blurred frontiers” (Independent on Sunday). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1981 and, in the following year, won the National Poetry Competition. He was recently awarded the TS Eliot Prize for his collection The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009). His other collections for adults include Familiars (Peterloo, 1983), The Ice Factory (Faber, 1984), Cat’s Whisker (Faber, 1987), The Son of the Duke of Nowhere (Faber, 1991), I.D. (Faber, 1994), The Wasting Game (Bloodaxe, 1998), Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (Bloodaxe, 2001), Mappa Mundi (Bloodaxe, 2003) and The Egg of Zero (Bloodaxe, 2006).