Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry collections include Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women, Landing Light, Rain and 40 Sonnets. He has published two books of aphorism, The Book of Shadows and The Blind Eye, as well as translations of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke. He is also the author of Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, Smith: A Reader's Guide to the Poetry of Michael Donaghy, and The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and teaches at the University of St Andrews, where he is Professor of Poetry. Since 1997 he has been Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. For many years he has also worked as a jazz musician and composer. He lives in Edinburgh.