Marggraf Turley was born in the Forest of Dean and moved to Wales at the age of seven.

His first collection of poetry The Fossil Box was published by Cinnamon Press in 2007. Robert Minhinnick, editor of Poetry Wales, praised its 'rare and intense musicality'. The poems are concerned with the urgency of place and origins. He is also co-author, with Damian Walford Davies, of Whiteout (Parthian, 2006). In 2008, Marggraf Turley signed with Salt, who published a new collection entitled "Wan-Hu's Flying Chair" in March 2009 (long-listed for the Wales Book of the Year, 2010).

In 2007 Marggraf Turley won first prize in the tenth-anniversary Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. His poem, 'Elisions', was written on the competition theme of slavery. He has made appearances on Radio 3's poetry programme, 'The Verb', presented by Ian McMillan. He performed with Damian Walford Davies at the 2009 Guardian Hay Festival. Both are reading at the 2010 Hay Festival.

In 2010, together with Professor Reyer Zwiggelaar and Dr Bashar Rajoub of the Computer Science department at Aberystwyth University, Richard Marggraf Turley conducted a "Valentine's Day experiment" using thermal imaging cameras to determine whether reading love poetry produced distinct thermal signatures on the faces of volunteers. He was testing a Romantic theory of poetry. Over 50 million images were recorded, amounting to five terrabytes of data. The full results of the analyses will be released in Spring 2010. The event attracted attention from both the popular and scientific press in the run-up to Valentine's Day. Also in 2010, he won the Wales Book of the Year "People's Choice" award (sponsored by Media Wales) for "Wan-Hu's Flying Chair".

Marggraf Turley works in the English faculty at Aberystwyth University. In addition to poetry, he has written a number of books on Keats and the Romantic poets, including Keats's Boyish Imagination, which was widely praised, but caused some controversy in the Times Literary Supplement. He is co-founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Romantic Studies, Aberystwyth, the first of its kind in Wales.

He lives near Aberystwyth on the Ceredigion coast. He is also a blues musician.He is also the uncle of the acclaimed singer/songwriter Ellie Goulding .