Born in New Zealand, Robyn Marsack left her hometown of Wellington to study at Oxford University, where she was awarded a D.Phil. in English literature. Compiling a selection of Edmund Blunden’s poems led her to Carcanet Press, where she began her editorial apprenticeship, working on books and the house journal PN Review. Alongside her immersion in the world of literary publishing, she was encouraged to try her hand at translation from French. After moving to Scotland in 1987, she became a freelance publishers’ editor, working for Carcanet and also educational publishers. Scotland gave her the opportunity to review poetry and prose for newspapers and journals, and to serve on the Literary and Publishing panels of the Scottish Arts Council.

Robyn won the Scott-Moncrieff Prize in 1988 for her translation of the Swiss-French travel writer Nicolas Bouvier’s The Scorpion-Fish (republished by Eland, 2014) and went on to translate his classic L’Usage du Monde / The Way of the World (republished by Eland / nyrb, 2007) with a Foreword by Patrick Leigh-Fermor.

She was Director of the Scottish Poetry Library from 2000 to 2016. Amongst many other activities, she inaugurated its publishing programme, edited several poetry anthologies, and enjoyed facilitating poetry translation workshops in partnership with Literature Across Frontiers. She maintained her NZ connections, co-editing the anthology Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets with Andrew Johnston (VUP/Carcanet), and editing Best NZ Poems online in 2009.

Since leaving the Library, Robyn has been a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Glasgow 2016-2018 and, as well as becoming a Trustee of the Edwin Morgan Trust, served as Chair of the Board of Trustees of StAnza, Scotland’s international poetry festival 2017-2022. She has served on other boards of literary organisations in England, Scotland and Wales, and remains a member of the board of Carcanet Press. Her compilation of letters celebrating Carcanet’s jubilee, Fifty Fifty, was published in autumn 2019, as was her translation of essays by Nicolas Bouvier, So It Goes, from Eland.

Robyn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023. She is continuing to work on literary and cultural aspects of the First World War.