Gregory Dowling

Gregory Dowling grew up in Bristol, UK. He studied English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He moved to Italy after graduating and has lived there since 1979, teaching in language schools in Naples, Siena, Verona and eventually Venice, where he has lived since 1981. He is now Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He published four thrillers in the 1980s and 1990s and then devoted himself to academic work and translation. He returned to fiction in 2015, with his novel set in 18th-century Venice, Ascension. His academic work mainly concerns British and American poetry; he has published a study of American narrative poetry, a study of the poet David Mason, a guidebook to Byron's Venice and has co-edited two anthologies of 20th-century poetry. He has also published numerous essays and articles on writers from the Romantic period to the present day. He is non-fiction editor for the magazine Able Muse and is responsible for the British section of the Italian poetry magazine Semicerchio. He has also written numerous articles on Venice, and was responsible for the sightseeing pages of the first five editions of the Time Out Guide to Venice. He is on the board of the committee for a new museum in Ravenna devoted to Lord Byron, due to open in 2017.