Richard Berengarten (previously known as Richard Burns) was born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians. He studied English at Cambridge (1961-1964) and Linguistics at University College London (1977-78). In 1975, he founded the international Cambridge Poetry Festival, which ran until 1985. He has lived in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and the USA, and has worked extensively in the Czech Republic, Latvia, Macedonia, Poland, Slovenia and Russia. His poetry, most of which is now available from Shearsman books, integrates English, European, Slavic, Jewish, Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese and American traditions. His books include: Avebury (1972); Learning to Talk (1980); Roots/Routes (1982); Black Light: Poems in Memory of George Seferis (1983, 1986, 1995); Against Perfection (1999); The Manager (2001, 2008, 2011); Book With No Back Cover (2003); For the Living: Selected Longer Poems 1965-2000 (2003, 2008, 2011); In a Time of Drought (2006, 2008, 2011); The Blue Butterfly (2006, 2008, 2011); Under Balkan Light (2008, 2011);Manual (2014); and Notness, a series of one hundred sonnets (2015). His prose works include Keys to Transformation: Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas (1981) and a variety of uncollected essays. He is currently working on a series of theoretical statements entitled Imagems: Towards a Universalist Poetics, the first of which has appeared as Imagems 1 (2013). Forthcoming books include Changing, poems based on Yi Jing (I Ching) (2016); and RB: A Portrait in Inter-Views, ed. John Dillon (2016). The Critical Companion to Richard Berengarten (eds. Norman Jope, Paul Scott Derrick and Catherine E. Byfield, 2011, 2015) contains thirty-four essays from contributors in eleven countries. Richard Berengarten has translated poetry, fiction and criticism from Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Macedonian and Serbian. He is recipient of the Eric Gregory Award (1972), the Keats Memorial Prize (1974), the Duncan Lawrie Prize (1982), the Yeats Club Prize (1989), the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Award for Poetry (1992), the international Morava Charter Prize (Serbia, 2005) and the Manada Prize (Macedonia, 2011). His book The Blue Butterfly provided the Veliki školski ?as memorial-oratorio for Nazi massacre-victims in Kragujevac (Serbia, 2007), and he was made an honorary citizen of Kragujevac in 2012. A former Arts Council of Great Britain Writer-in-Residence at the Victoria Adult Education Centre, Gravesend (1979-1981), Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame (1982), British Council Lector, Belgrade (1987-1990), Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge (2003-2005) and Project Fellow (2005-2006), he is currently a Bye-Fellow at Downing College and an Academic Associate at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He also teaches at Peterhouse and Wolfson College, Cambridge, and is a Fellow of the English Association. He has three children and two grandchildren. He lives in Cambridge with his wife Melanie Rein, a Jungian psychotherapist.
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