Robert Yates was born in Southport, but spent his formative years getting criticised in Liverpool. The best thing he ever did was to leave Merseyside and move to Newcastle, ostensibly to do a degree in French and German. This was followed by a postgraduate diploma in translation studies (French, German and Russian) at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He also dipped in and out of evening courses in Japanese, Arabic, Welsh and Ancient Egyptian, and taught himself some Latvian and Lithuanian. He has worked as a translator for multinational pharmaceutical companies, corporate paralegals, The Financial Times and Worlds of Cthulhu, as well as doing voluntary work for the British Stammering Association. His literary translations include Rimbaud’s Illuminations (published by Brimstone Press in 2014) as well as pieces by Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Goethe, Kafka, Péladan and Jacques Brel. A mainstay of the London poetry scene, his own poems have been published in such magazines as The Wolf, Abraxas, Ariadne’s Thread, The Frogmore Papers, La Reata, The Echo Room, Agenda Broadsheet and the Morning Star newspaper.

Robert Yates has published three collections of his poems: Visions of Ecstasy and Boredom (2003), Appendices to Life (2004) and Go And Dance To Your A-Sides If You Must (2006). A fourth collection Nihilistic City Nights will be published soon by London Poetry Books. His prose-poem sequence Work in Progress was published in 2013 on the International Times website. He is currently working on a non-narrative novella entitled A Portrait of the Piss-Artist as a Young Conservative.