Poet Fleur Adcock was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 10 February 1934, but spent much of her childhood, including the war years, in England. She studied Classics at Victoria University in Wellington and taught at the University of Otago, moving to London in 1963 where she worked as a librarian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She has held various literary fellowships, including a period at the Charlotte Mason College of Education, Ambleside (1977-78). Later she held the Northern Arts Fellowship at the Universities of Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham (1979-81), where she met the composer Gillian Whitehead with whom she collaborated on a song cycle libretto and later a full-length opera about Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1984 she was Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She has been writing full-time since 1981. Her poetry has received numerous awards, many of them from her native New Zealand, and she won a Cholmondeley Award in 1976. She was awarded an OBE in 1996. A collected edition of Fleur Adcock's poetry, Poems 1960-2000, was published in 2000, and she is a regular contributor to, as well as editor and translator of, poetry anthologies. She was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 2006, and in 2008 was named Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. Her latest poetry collection is Dragon Talk (2010).