Tom Burton was born in Barbados, grew up on a farm in Shropshire, studied English at the University of Bristol in the 1960s, and taught for three years in secondary schools in East Africa and England before coming to the University of Adelaide in 1974.
Reader in English at the University of Adelaide, he has specialized in medieval English literature and the history of the language. He is the author of Words, Words, Words (1995) and Words in Your Ear (1999); the founding director of the Chaucer Studio (a non-profit organization that makes recordings of historical and regional English texts, in period pronunciation, for use as teaching aids); and general editor of a series of annotated bibliographies of medieval English literature published in the UK. He has special interests in historical and regional pronunciation, in linguistic change, and in literature in performance.
Although he has no pretensions to writing poetry himself, he is fascinated by poems, their forms, their styles, and the creative use of language in them, and has offered a course at the University of Adelaide on 'Reading and Writing Poetry'.
