David John Constantine (born 1944) is an English poet, short story writer, novelist, and translator.
David John Constantine (born 1944) is an English poet, short story writer, novelist, and translator.
Born in Salford, Constantine read Modern Languages at Wadham College, Oxford, where he also completed his DPhil on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. From 1969 to 1981, he lectured in German at Durham University. In 1981, he took up a fellowship in German at The Queen's College, Oxford, becoming a supernumerary fellow in 2000.
He was a literary editor of The Oxford Magazine and from 2004 to 2013 was the co-editor, with Helen Constantine, of the literary journal Modern Poetry in Translation. Along with the Irish poet Bernard O'Donoghue, he became commissioning editor of the Oxford Poets imprint of Carcanet Press in 2000 and has been a chief judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
His collections of poetry include Madder, Watching for Dolphins, Caspar Hauser, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts, Collected Poems and Nine Fathom Deep. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2020.
He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2024 he published A Bird Called Elaeus, his translation and arrangement of poems from the Greek Anthology. He won the Popescu Prize for translation in 2003 and was shortlisted in 2015.
Constantine has published six collections of short stories, plus a selected volume. In 2013, his collection Tea at the Midland and Other Stories won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, making Constantine the first English writer to win this award. The title story from this collection won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2010. His other collections of short stories include Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009), which was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and The Dressing-Up Box and Other Stories (2019).
Constantine's short story "In Another Country", from Under the Dam, was adapted for film as 45 Years. Released in 2015, the film stars Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. It won the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Best British/Irish Film at the London Film Critics' Circle awards. Rampling was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.
Constantine is also author of two novels, Davies and The Life-Writer, and a biography, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton.
