Alistair Elliot was born in Liverpool in 1932. My Country, his collected poems, came out in 1989. His Italian Landscape Poems and his translation of Euripides’ Medea, made for the Almeida Theatre and Diana Rigg, appeared in 1993. He also published as parallel texts a version of Heine’s Lazarus Poems, a selection of French Love Poems, Valéry’s La Jeune Parque, and an annotated edition of Virgil’s and Dryden’s Georgics. He published eight books of translation, including Roman Food Poems and a complete reconstruction of the fragments of Euripides' Phaethon.