Paterson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990 and his poem "A Private Bottling" won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition in 1993.[2] He was included on the list of 20 poets chosen for the Poetry Society's 1994 "New Generation Poets" promotion.[2] In 2002, he was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award.[1]
His first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. God's Gift to Women (1997) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. The Eyes, adaptations of the work of Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939), was published in 1999. He is the editor of 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (1999) and of Last Words: New Poetry for the New Century (1999) with Jo Shapcott. Paterson's collection of poems Landing Light (2003) won both the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award.[3] He has also published three collections of aphorisms, The Book of Shadows (2004), The Blind Eye (2007) and Best Thought, Worst Thought (2008). Orpheus, his version of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus, was published in 2006.[1]
Paterson teaches in the school of English at the University of St Andrews and was the poetry editor for London publishers Picador for more than 25 years.[3] An accomplished jazz guitarist, he works solo and for ten years ran the jazz-folk ensemble Lammas with Tim Garland.[4][5]
In 2012, Paterson wrote an open letter in The Herald criticising Scotland's arts funding council Creative Scotland.[6]
In 2012–2013, he was the Weidenfeld Visiting professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford.[7]
Paterson's memoir Toy Fights: A Boyhood was published by Faber in January 2023.
