Christopher Whyte

Who is Christopher Whyte?

Christopher Whyte is a Scottish poet, novelist, translator and critic.

He was born in 1952 in Glasgow and graduated from St. Aloysius' College and, later, Cambridge University. For many years he lived in Italy before moving back to Scotland in 1985 to teach Scottish literature at Glasgow University. Since then he has lived in Budapest as a full-time writer.

Whyte first published some translations of modern poetry into Gaelic, including poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Konstantinos Kavafis, Yannis Ritsos and Anna Akhmatova. He then published two collections of original poetry in Gaelic, Uirsgeul, 1991 and An Tràth Duilich, 2002. In the meantime he started to write prose in English and has published four novels, Euphemia MacFarrigle and the Laughing Virgin, The Warlock of Strathearn, The Gay Decameron and The Cloud Machinery.

In 2002 he won a Scottish Research Book of the Year award for his edition of Sorley Maclean's Dàin do Eimhir, published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Whyte has also compiled some anthologies of present-day Gaelic poetry and written critical articles and essays.