Considered among the major poets of the English language, Fleur Adcock was born in Papakura, New Zealand in 1934 and educated at Victoria University. She worked as a librarian before turning to writing full time in the 1970s. Adcock has written eight volumes of poetry including Selected Poems (1983), The Incident Book (1986), and Time Zones (1991). She has edited several anthologies. Adcock was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984, the year in which she received the New Zealand Book Award for Selected Poems. She was the recipient of the 1997 T.S. Eliot Prize and the winner of the Whitbread book of the Year 1997. Adcock lives in London