Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, since when he has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy's Rain won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002 and his last collection, I Knew the Bride, was published in 2014 and shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. In 2004 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.