In conversation with Michael Symmons Roberts

Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1963. He has published five collectionsof poetry: Soft Keys (1993), Raising Sparks (1999), Burning Babylon (2001), Corpus (2004), which won the Whitbread Award, and The Half-Healed (2008). He is also a novelist (Patrick's Alphabet (2006), Breath (2008)), a librettist, a maker of many film and radio documentaries, and a teacher of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. The interview took place in Buxton on 20 July 2010; that evening Mozart's Zaide, the libretto adapted by Michael, was performed at the Buxton Opera House