In a career spanning five decades, W.S. Merwin, poet, translator and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read - and imitated - poets in America. He was born in 1927 the son of a Presbyterian minister for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five. As a young man, from 1949 to 1951, W.S. Merwin went to Europe and discovered a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval – influenced somewhat by Robert Graves and the medieval poetry he was then translating - to a more distinctly American voice, following his two years in Boston where he got to know Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich and Donald Hall, all of whom were breaking out of the rhetoric of the 1950s. W.S. Merwin's recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow.

His first book, A Mask for Janus, was published in 1952 in the Yale Younger Poets series -- chosen by W.H. Auden. His book of poems, The Carrier of Ladders, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. His other books include The Drunk in the Furnace, The Moving Target, The Lice, Flower & Hand, The Compass Flower, Feathers from the Hill, Opening the Hand, The Rain in the Trees, Travels, The Vixen, The Lost Upland, Unframed Originals, and The Folding Cliffs. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, among many others. His latest works include the collections of poems The River Sound as well as a new translation of Dante’s Purgatorio. In the fall of 2002, National Geographic Directions published a travel prose book by W.S. Merwin entitled The Mays of Ventador; and Knopf published W.S. Merwin’s new translation of the classic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Copper Canyon Press (in 2003) is reissuing his Jean Follain’s poems, Transparence of the World, and Antonio Porchia’s Voices. In 2004, Shoemaker & Hoard released The Ends of the Earth, a gathering of essays expressing the breadth of W.S. Merwin’s fascination with the natural world and the explorers who have journeyed through it; this work is Merwin’s first new prose collection in more than a decade. William Merwin’s selected poems collection will be published in spring 2005 by Copper Canyon Press and is entitled Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001. In the fall of 2005 his next book of new poems, Present Company, will also be published by Copper Canyon Press. In the fall of 2004, William Merwin was awarded the prestigious 2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award.