Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1944 and was educated locally and at the University of Leeds. He has taught at the University of Wales, Long Island University in Brooklyn and for many years at the Manchester Metropolitan University where he was Professor in the Department of English and its Writing School until 2008.

His first poetry collection was published by Northern House in 1971 and first full book, Heart’s Desire, by Carcanet in 1978. Carcanet Press also publish his Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994), Out of the Air (1999) and Clarity or Death! (2008), The Reasoner (2012), What Must Happen (2016) and most recently As Best We Can (2020). He has translated plays by Péguy, Claudel and Corneille for BBC Radio 3 and his version of Bernard-Marie Koltès' In the Silence of Cotton Fields was broadcast in March 1999 and among other stage productions is the one by the Actors Touring Company in London and tour September-November 2001. The text is available in Koltès: Plays 2 (Methuen 2004).

For eleven years, 1989-99, he was northern theatre critic of The Independent contributing twenty or more reviews per year. Radio work has included reviews for Kaleidoscope, Night Waves and On Air. His book, Poetry the Basics, was published by Routledge in April 2004, third edition 2016, and his book on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Acceptable Words, in 2005. He has also published many articles on modern and contemporary poetry. He lives in Manchester and for part of the year in Umbria.