Richard Burns (aka Richard Berengarten) was born in London into a family of musicians. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge and University College London. He has lived in Greece, Italy, the UK, the USA and former Yugoslavia. His first book of poetry was published in 1967.

Whilst lecturing at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University) in 1975, he launched and co-ordinated the Cambridge Poetry Festival presenting international poets like John Ashbery, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Ted Hughes, Michael Hamburger and numerous others.

Poems and poetry books have been translated into more than 20 languages (the poem Volta, presented in issue 9/2009 of The International Literary Quarterly (London) - Richard Burns, Volta: A Multilingual Anthology - into 75. Crna Svetlost (Black Light) was published in Yugoslavia in 1984, Arbol (Tree) in Spain in 1986, and bilingual editions of Tree/Baum (1989) and Black Light/Schwarzes Licht (1996), both translated by Theo Breuer, were published in Germany.

His perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. On his own work Richard Berengarten says: "I would rather think of myself as a European poet who writes in English than as an 'English' poet."

Berengarten is a fabulous reader of his own poetry, and a dynamic teacher.

Richard Berengarten lives in Cambridge.