McKendrick was born in Liverpool, 27 October 1955, and educated at the Quaker school, Bootham, York, and Liverpool College. He studied English Literature at the University of Nottingham and graduated in 1975 at the age of 20. Between 1985 and 1987, he worked in a team of language teachers at the University of Salerno.
McKendrick has published seven collections of poetry and two Selected Poems. He is also the editor of The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004).
Criticism
McKendrick has written reviews and essays on literature and art for numerous newspapers and magazines, including the TLS, the LRB, Independent on Sunday, The Atheaneum Review and Modern Painters. His essays have been published in several books including: Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery; Writers on Art; Literary Activism; he has also written catalogue essays for exhibitions by Arturo Di Stefano and Donald Wilkinson, and an introduction to Tom Lubbock's English Graphic (Francis Lincoln, 2012).
A collection of his writings on art, poetry and translation, The Foreign Connection, was published by Legenda, 2020, ISBN978-1-78188-500-0
Translations
McKendrick has translated six books of fiction by the Italian novelist Giorgio Bassani, including The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, published as individual volumes by Penguin and, for the first time in English, in a collected edition by Penguin and by Norton in the US.
Awards
McKendrick was named as one of the Poetry Society's 'New Generation' poets in the 1990s, with the Society selecting his 1997 collection Marble Fly as a Poetry Society Book Choice. McKendrick's collections was shortlisted for the 1997 and 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award, and the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize. His translations of Giorgio Bassani were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld prize and for the John Florio award.
Awards received include:
2020 Michael Marks Illustration Award (for The Years)
2020 Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Award (for The Years) [shortlisted]
2019 Cholmondeley Award
2016 John Florio Italian Translation Award for Antonella Anedda's Archipelago
2014 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
2013 Hawthornden Prize for Out There
2010 John Florio Italian Translation Award for Valerio Magrelli The Embrace
The Years – pamphlet illustrated by the author (Arc Publications, 2020)
Translations
Giorgio Bassani: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Penguin, 2007, republished Folio, 2014)
Valerio Magrelli: The Embrace: Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2009, republished in a bilingual edition as Vanishing Points by Farrar Straus Giroux, 2011)
Giorgio Bassani: The Novel of Ferrara (Penguin, 2018, Norton, 2018)
Work translated
McKendrick's poems have appreared in translation in France, Italy, Germany, in Sweden, Holland, Turkey, Iran, Spain, and Argentina. Other translations have been published as books in Holland, Italy, Sweden and Spain:
Een versteende dierentuin: Gedichten translated by Ko Kooman (Wagner & Van Santen, Sliedrecht, 2000)
Chiodi di cielo, translated by L. Guerneri and A. Anedda (Donzelli, Rome, 2003)
En förlorad stad, translated by Lars-Håkan Svennson and Lasse Söderberg (Bokförlaget Faethon, Stockholm, 2020)
Un perro verde, translated by Nieves García Prados (Valparaíso, Granada, 2021)
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