This is the website of Edinburgh-based poet and translator Ken Cockburn.

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Thanks to everyone who came on one of the Embro walks as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2025. I did 11 walks in all, and really enjoyed meeting everyone and sharing the city and its poems with them. (Plus the weather was kind throughout.)

Special thanks to Katie L. for her review in Broadway Baby, and to Grace Wallis for her review in A Youngish Perspective, where the sentence below comes from.

“A seasoned pro at making even the shakiest poetry fans feel comfortable and engaged, [Ken] is the perfect poet-historian to guide you along an intimate amble through the city’s historied Royal Mile.”

“… repeatedly in Cockburn’s poetry you get the impression of a poet who has sown nothing but good will in his craft and is slowly reaping this in his work.”
Richie McCaffrey, on Floating the Woods

“Every so often I come across a book of poems that is irresistible for the absolute ‘rightness’ of its project; a book that has that unerring quality of integrity, craft and communication with the reader; a book that’s doing something slightly out of the ordinary, but wearing that difference in an unostentatious manner. This was that book for me. A delight.” Andy Brown, on The Road North

“From the outset, I find the poems, their ingredients and flavour, and your meticulous joy with words, a delight.”
Stewart Conn, on On the flyleaf

“It is refreshing to read contemporary poetry of such rare grace and compassion… a welcome contribution to the literature of our nomadic century.” Tom Hubbard, on Souvenirs and Homelands