Gordon Jarvie was born in Edinburgh and educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Sussex, where he gained an MPhil in 1968. He has worked as a teacher and editor at Purdue University in the USA, as well as for publishers such as Collins and Oxford University Press. A well-known editor and prose writer, in the 1990s he began to focus more on his poetry and has produced poems both in English and in Scots. His collections and pamphlets include Ayrshire Recessional (1998), Time's Traverse: Poems 1991-2001 (2002), Climber's Calendar (2007), La Baudunais (2009), Out and About: Poetry Mainly from the East Neuk, Fife (2012) and Bessy Bell and other Irish Intersections (2013).