Todd Swift was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on Good Friday, 1966, and grew up in St-Lambert.  He was one of Canada’s top-ranked student debaters throughout high school and university.  He graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University.  In the 1990s he helped develop spoken word in Canada, with his poetry cabarets.  His CD-length experimental text-music collaboration with Tom Walsh, Swifty Lazarus: The Envelope, Please, was released by Wired On Words in 2002. A graduate of the MA in Creative Writing (Distinction) at UEA, he is core tutor with The Poetry School, and a university creative writing lecturer.  His recent critical study of Anglo-Quebec poetry, Language Acts, co-edited with Jason Camlot, was a finalist for the 2007 Gabrielle Roy Prize.  His poems have appeared in the major anthologies The New Canon and Open Field.  He is the editor of many significant international poetry anthologies, including Poetry Nation, Short Fuse, and 100 Poets Against The War; and the poetry editor of Nthposition.  In 2005, he edited a special section on The Young Canadian Poets for New American Writing.  He has had four full collections of poems published by DC Books in Montreal, and his Seaway: New and Selected is out end of October, from Irish press Salmon.  As Oxfam Great Britain’s first Poet-in-residence, 2004-2008, he ran the influential Oxfam Poetry Series, and edited the best-selling CDs, Life Lines and Life Lines 2 - Poets for Oxfam.

In 1997, Swift moved to Budapest, then to Paris in 2001.  He now lives and works in London, England, with his Irish wife, Sara Egan.