Angela Leighton was born in Wakefield, educated in Edinburgh and Oxford, and has taught at the universities of Hull and Cambridge. The daughter of a Yorkshire father and a Neapolitan mother, she has always recognised her heritage of mixed languages and conflicting assumptions. Perhaps for this reason her work has always pushed at the boundaries of literary form. Her most recent critical book, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018), sets creative prose alongside critical thinking to suggest the connections between them. She has published short stories and reviews in many journals, as well as four previous volumes of poetry: A Cold Spell (2000), Sea Level (2007), The Messages (2012) and Spills (2016) - this last interweaving memoir, short story, translation (from the Italian) as well as original poetry.