Angela Leighton was born in Wakefield, educated in Edinburgh and Oxford, and has taught at the universities of Hull and Cambridge. The daughter of a Yorkshire (composer) father and a Neapolitan mother, she has always recognised her heritage of mixed languages and conflicting standpoints. Her book, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018), sets autobiographical prose beside critical writing to suggest the connections between them, while her volume, Spills (2016), interweaves memoir, short story and translation with original poetry. She has published poetry and short stories in many magazines, including the New Yorker, TLS, Poetry Chicago, Archipelago, The Dark Horse and PNR. This is her sixth volume of poetry.