About David
He has degrees in French and English from the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford and spent much of his working life as a teacher of French at University level. In 2003, he changed course to focus on the teaching of creative writing and after retiring in 2019 is now Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.
In addition to his collections of poetry, David is the author of a monograph on the French writer, Joseph Joubert, a number of edited books and many papers on a variety of French and Scottish writers including Mallarmé, Edwin Morgan and Hugh MacDiarmid. In 1983 he co-founded the literary journal, Verse, with Robert Crawford and Henry Hart and co-edited it with them for the next ten years.
A recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson memorial award and of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship for his poetry, David set up a cultural exchange between Scotland and Switzerland which ran for much of the ‘noughties’ and helped to found the Scottish Writers’ Centre in 2008. In the same year he launched the inaugural Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, now the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, which he continues to administer as the current Chair of The Edwin Morgan Trust.
: :
Black and white images by Gerry Cambridge