Chris McCully was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1958. Educated at Malsis and Bootham, he took a first-class degree in English Language (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1982) and completed a doctorate at the University of Manchester (1988). For many years Chris continued to work in the Department of English at Manchester, specialising in teaching and research on language-related topics, particularly poetic form, poetic history and English phonology.

During the 1980s and 90s Chris authored, edited or co-authored collections of poems; essays; a fragment of angling autobiography (which ended up as fiction); a textbook on metrical theory; a dictionary of fly-fishing; conference proceedings....and continued producing academic papers, essays, reviews, and angling features. Some of this work appeared in two journals with which Chris has long been associated, PN Review and Trout and Salmon. Chris also engaged in at least one lecture tour across the USA and gave poetry readings, papers and talks in Spain, Poland, Finland, Japan, Canada, France, Germany...and once, somewhere near Huddersfield.

In 2003 Chris gave up full-time academic work in order to develop a career as a writer. He's still not quite sure whether that was wise, but continues to produce the same range of work - indeed, a wider range, from the analysis of addiction to Ezra Pound's lineation in the Cantos; from the design of pike streamers to the phenomenon of garden gnomes; from level-ordered morphology to the names and structures of seaweeds. In 2004 Jessica Kingsley (London) published his memoir on alcoholism a­nd recovery, Goodbye, Mr. Wonderful, and in 2005 Pearson Longman (London) brought out his co-authored textbook on The Earliest English - a work which was the subject of a positive (and very funny) review in the THES ('How Damgudthyng Conquered the World'). In 2006 - and much to Chris's surprise - CUP reissued in paperback his co-edited work English Historical Metrics. In 2006 he also edited Passion for Pike, by the Dutch writer, artist and photographer Ad Swier (Westerlaan). In 2008 a selection of Chris's translations from Old English appeared from Carcanet Press under its imprint, ­Fyfield Books, and a further angling title, Sketches with Fishing Rods, with pencil illustrations by Ad, appeared from Westerlaan. In 2009 a new full-length collection of poems (Polder) was published by Carcanet and a textbook, The Sound Structure of English (with an accompanying website) appeared from CUP. The Medlar Press published Chris's analysis of pike fishing, Fishing and Pike Lures, late in 2009.

Chris has just completed his part of the work involved in the co-edited volume Analysing Older English, has also completed a book of essays relating to natural history and the northern Netherlands (Outside, published 2011) and with Ken Whelan and James Sadler has embarked on a major new project concerning Irish sea-trout and sea-trout fishing (Irish Sea-trout: Nomads of the Tides, projected publication 2013, The Medlar Press). A book containing essays on travel, From the Last Sane Places on Earth, is scheduled to appear from Carcanet in 2014, and Chris's Selected Poems were published, again by Carcanet, in March 2011. Meanwhile, work on a new collection of poems, probably to be called The Ridings, has begun.

Chris continues to contribute gratefully and with regularity - a happy or frightening regularity, depending on your point of view - to fishing journals both in the UK (Trout and Salmon; Waterlog) and in the Netherlands (see for example 'Juweeltje van East Yorkshire' ['Jewel of East Yorkshire', the Driffield Beck at Mulberry Whin] in issue number 74, 2009). Some of his essays in Outside were translated (2009) by Marrie Kuipers, and appeared together with an introductory interview in the Dutch journal Noorderbreedte in 2010.

In 2003 Chris was granted the title of Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts, University of Manchester, and (with Michael Schmidt and Rachel Beckett) he remains one of the directors of the Modern Literary Archives Project (John Rylands University Library, Manchester). He also gives a range of training courses on different aspects of writing in the English language to graduates and other professionals (please see also 'Taalcentrum VU').

Chris is married and lives in the north of the Netherlands, close to the Wadden Sea. In his non-existent spare time Chris works with the Labrador, Tess, is developing his garden, tries not to fret...and goes fishing.

Photos: top ©James Sadler 2010, bottom ©Gardiner Mitchell 2009