Michael Swan works in English language teaching and applied linguistics. He has been writing poetry for many years, driven no doubt by an unconscious need to prove that grammarians have souls. His poems have been published widely in magazines, and have won a number of prizes. He clings to the belief that it is possible to write good poetry that is neither difficult nor boring, and he often finds humour a useful tool in dealing with a seriously confusing universe.
 
Michael’s first collection, When They Come For You, was published by Frogmore Press in 2003; his second, The Shapes of Things, was published by Oversteps Books in 2011. A selection of his poems accompanied by Romanian translations, Tiger Dreams / Vise Cu Tigri, was published by Niculescu in 2014. All three books were very well received. The critical response that pleased Michael most came from a French friend: ‘Merci pour la simplicité malicieuse de tes textes’. Will Daunt, in Envoi, had a similar reaction: ‘The beauty of Michael Swan‘s writing is the artifice beneath its deliberate simplicity. … The careless may miss the rich seams of absurdity and irony’. Catherine Smith, in The New Writer, called When They Come For You ‘a sharp, wryly observed collection, intelligent and perceptive,’ adding ‘There’s a nicely surreal edge to much of the work, but it’s poetry that remains open and accessible’. Jim Burns, writing in Ambit, was not quite so overwhelmed, but conceded that some of Michael’s poems had a ‘loose, rhythmic flow’; he didn’t say of what.
 
Michael also enjoys translating poetry, and has twice been a prizewinner in the Times Stephen Spender competition for poetry in translation.