Chris McCully was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1958. Between 1985 and 2003 he worked as a full-time academic, specialising in the history of the English language, English sound-structure, and verse-form at the University of Manchester. From 2003 to 2013 he worked part-time at universities in the Netherlands (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam; Rijksuniversiteit, Groningen) while researching and writing a number of books. His Selected Poems appeared from Carcanet in 2012. McCully is chairman and co-director of the Modern Literary Archives programme at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. In 2013 he relocated with his wife to Colchester and the University of Essex, where he works in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies.
