Daryl Hine was born in 1936 in British Columbia, Canada. He studied classics and philosophy at McGill University and after an interval abroad took a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago in 1967. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and Northwestern University. From 1968 to 1978 he edited Poetry. Since that time, he has published six collections, including a Selected Poems (1980) and two book-length poems, Academic Festival Overtures (1985), and In & Out (1989), both detailing events of his youth. In 1986, he was elected a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prestigious 'genius grant' for his work as poet and translator. Among his publications as translator of Greek and Latin are versions of Ovid's Heroines (1991), the erotic epigrams of the Greek Anthology in Puerilities (2001), and Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns (2005) - for the latter he was awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by the Academy of American Poets. Recollected Poems: 1 951- 2004 appeared in 2007.

At the time of this interview - October 2006 to March 2007 - Hine was in Evanston, Illinois, the interviewer in Manchester, England. The correspondence was conducted by e-mail.

EVAN JONES: You express throughout Academic Festival Overtures, and in your introduction to Recollected Poems, ...