Keston Sutherland was born in Bristol in 1976. He went to Turnpike comprehensive school until he was 16 then for sixth form to St. Bart's comprehensive, both in Newbury. He graduated with a BA from Cambridge University in 1997, was the Joseph Hodges Choate Fellow at Harvard University 1997-8, and submitted his PhD, titled 'J. H. Prynne and philology', at Cambridge in 2004. He has lived in Brighton and worked at the University of Sussex since then. In 2013 he was the Holloway Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley and in 2016 he was the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University. Sutherland was the editor of the poetics and critical theory journal QUID and is co-editor of Barque Press. His poetry has been compared to J. H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, and Drew Milne. His work has won international recognition: his major 2007 poem Hot White Andy was first published in the United States in a special issue of Chicago Review showcasing four young British poets ; it has been reviewed as "the most remarkable poem in English published this century". Sutherland has translated a number of poets into English, including Jean-Marie Gleize, Jean-Michel Espitallier and Monika Rinck. His 2017 book Whither Russia contains translations of Verlaine, Heine, Tasso, Hölderlin, Gautier le Leu and Toulet. Together with his colleagues at the University of Sussex, Sam Solomon, Natalia Cecire and Joe Luna, Sutherland runs the Sussex Poetry Festival, an annual two-day celebration of anti-capitalist and deranged poetry and music in Brighton, UK. The Festival began in 2009. Sutherland has collaborated a number of times with the American artist Stephen G. Rhodes. Rhodes has made shows containing texts by Sutherland in Berlin, London, Brighton and Los Angeles. His book on Marx and poetry, Stupefaction: a radical anatomy of phantoms was published by Seagull Books in May 2011. In 2019, he contributed a chapter 'The poetics of Capital' to the collection Capitalism: concept, idea image, the first in a series of free ebooks from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London. Sutherland has written many essays on poetry, philosophy and Marx. A complete list is available on his staff page at the University of Sussex. Many of his performances of his poetry can be heard on YouTube and on his Soundcloud page. A number of substantial interviews and dialogues with Sutherland are available online.
