Lilac Cigarette in a Wish Cathedral

Robin Magowan received a B.A. from Harvard, an M.A. from Columbia, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale. During the 1960s he taught at the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley. He moved to France in 1973, then to England in 1978, where in 1986 he founded the transatlantic review Margin, which he edited until 1990. The author of seven books of poetry, Magowan has also published a translation of Michaux's Ecuador; a study of the modern pastoral narrative, Narcissus and Orpheus; two collections of travel writing, And Other Voyages and Fabled Cities: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva; and two books on bicycle racing. He now lives in Salisbury, Connecticut, where he is working on his autobiography.