W.S. Merwin was US Poet Laureate in 2010-11. He has received most of the principal prizes in American poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the Bollingen Prize and the Tanning Prize, and a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. As well as being an internationally renowned poet, he is the author of many classic translations, including editions of Neruda, Dante, The Song of Roland, The Poem of the Cid, and (from Bloodaxe) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His latest titles from Bloodaxe are Selected Poems (2007), The Shadow of Sirius, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK, and The Moon Before Morning (2014), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Born in New Jersey City in 1927, he taught at several universities, and now lives on the Pacific island of Maui, where he tends to his writing and to his garden of rare and endangered palm trees.