Lachlan Mackinnon

Lachlan Mackinnon.Courtesy David Morley's Warwick blog.

Lachlan Mackinnon
Born	1956 Aberdeen, Scotland
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	Scottish
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford
Notable award(s)	Eric Gregory Award, 1986
Spouse(s)	Wendy Cope

Lachlan Mackinnon (born 1956) is a contemporary Scottish poet, journalist, and literary critic.

Life

Mackinnon was born in Aberdeen, and educated at Charterhouse School and Christ Church, Oxford.

His output includes four collections of poetry, two critical studies and a biography. He also reviews regularly for, among others, the Times Literary Supplement.

He took early retirement from his job as a teacher of English at Winchester College in 2011 and moved to Ely with his partner, poet Wendy Cope.

Writing

Critics have identified the influence of American poet Robert Lowell in Mackinnon's earliest 2 collections, Monterey Cypress and The Coast of Bohemia, published within 3 years of each other.

His 3rd collection, The Jupiter Collisions, contains, among others, 2 sequence-poems, and has among its subjects retrospective contemplation of the author's childhood and adolescence, both in personal details and in the context of the 'Sixties (rock music, space travel, Minimalist art). The collection also affords a small number of poems in sonnet form, despite the poet's tendency towards vers-libre, thereby combining the legacy of Lowell with that of Auden.

In 2010 he published Small Hours with Faber. This includes "The Book of Emma", a long poem addressed to a dead friend and written largely in prose. He also contributed to the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six, for which he wrote a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible.

Recognition

Small Hours was short-listed for the Forward Prize in 2010.

Mackinnon received a Cholmondeley Award in 2011.

Publications

Poetry

• Monterey Cypress. London: Chatto & Windus, 1988.
• The Coast of Bohemia. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.
• The Jupiter Collisions. London: Faber, 2003.
• Small Hours. London: Faber, 2010.

Play

• Sixty Six (short piece) for the Bush Theatre] 2011.

Non-fiction

• Eliot, Auden, Lowell: Aspects of the Baudelairean inheritance. London: Macmillan, 1983; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983.
• Shakespeare the Aesthete: An exploration of literary theory. London: Macmillan (Palgrave), 1988; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
• The Lives of Elsa Triolet. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.

Edited

Air by Yuansheng Li & Recited by Lachlan Mackinnon - Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry & Art Festival 2020

• New Writing 7: An anthology. Vintage, 1998.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

External links

Poems

• "Pigeon"
• "The Small Hours"
• "California Dreaming" at The Guardian

Prose

• "Seamus Heaney: A poet of unfailing integrity"

Books

• Lachlan Mackinnon at Amazon.com

About

• Lachlan Mackinnon at the British Council