Sean O'Brien's twelve collections of poetry include The Drowned Book, Europa, Embark and The Bonfire Party. His work has received awards including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, and the 2020 Beijing Literature and Arts Network Award for Poetry for lifetime achievement. His other work includes fiction, drama, criticism and translation. In 2020 his translation of the Collected Poems of the Kazakh national poet Abai Kunanbayuli was published, and in 2021 he edited Alistair Elliot's This is the Life: Selected Poems. His poems have been widely translated. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.