David Kinloch was born in 1959 in Glasgow, the city he grew up in. After teaching French for many years, David is now a Reader in Poetry, teaching Creative Writing and Scottish Literature, at the University of Strathclyde. He has four previous collections of poetry: Dustie-Fute (1992), Paris-Forfar (1994), Un Tour d'Ecosse (2001) and In My Father's House (2005). His fifth, Finger of a Frenchman, was published by Carcanet earlier this year.

WILLIAM WOOTEN: David, early on, you were associated with other Scottish poets of your generation, such as W.N. Herbert, Robert Crawford, Alan Riach, Peter McCarey and Richard Price. Indeed Richard Price even dubbed you 'Informationists'. Did you reckon yourself part of a poetic movement, or was this simply a case of young poets liking each other and discovering that they were doing similar things?

DAVID KINLOCH: The latter really. I knew both Robert and Bill [Herbert] as graduate students at Oxford in the early eighties, but I didn't meet or get to know any of the others until much later. Richard's essay is an interesting one. But it's not yet been critically tested. Indeed it's been rather casually taken up and used as a convenient pigeonhole for poets who have some points in common but much that separates and distinguishes them from each other. No, I never felt part of a group, although I like and admire the individuals you mention and have sometimes collaborated with them on a variety of projects. ...