Cliff Forshaw left school at sixteen and worked in an abattoir before studying painting at art college and developing an interest in languages and literatures, which he studied sporadically at Warwick, Cambridge and London. After working in Spain, Mexico, Italy, Germany, and New York, and freelance writing in London, he completed his doctorate on Renaissance Literature at Oxford. Since then he has lived in Snowdonia, and taught at Bangor, Sheffield, and now Hull University.

Cliff has been International Writer-in-Residence at Hobart, Tasmania, winner of the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award, Blue Nose Poet-of-the-Year, and twice a Hawthornden Writing Fellow.

He continues to paint and his first short­ film Drift was shown at the Humber Mouth Festival 2008. He is an experienced performer of his work: collaborations include performances of Trans set to music by Roddie Harris and Bethan Jones. He has published translations from a number of languages, and written widely on translation, myth, contemporary and Renaissance poetry. A particular interest is Elizabethan and Jacobean satirists and especially John Marston, best known for his play The Malcontent. Cliff is currently writing Marston’s Masks, a study of Marston’s banned satires and his prurient, psychopathic and hypocritical satirist persona, and some might say Marston’s alter ego, W Kinsayder. Further details of Cliff’s research can be found on his English Department staff page.

Cliff also writes fiction.