Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died before her first birthday, and her mother suffered a series of nervous collapses and was committed to a mental hospital when Bishop was five. After living with relatives and completing her education she lived in a range of locations — Canada, France, and Brazil, where she went for a two-week vacation in 1951 and ended up staying for fifteen years, until the death of her lover, Lota Soares. by suicide Towards the end of her life her family inheritance ran out, and she returned to America, to teach at Harvard University, where she stayed for seven years.

She counted among her contempories and friends the poets Marianne Moore, and Robert Lowell. The latter’s Confessional style wasn’t emulated by Bishop, who preferred to focus on the physical world and who preferred privacy in the content of her writing. Her work was admired then, as now, for its precise imagery, wit and morality.

Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. Her publications were sparse until her last book, Geography III (Chatto and Windus), in 1977, This established Bishop as a major figure in literature.

Bishop received a range of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her collection, ‘Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring’ (Houghton Mifflin, 1955). Her Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), won the National Book Award in 1970.

Elizabeth Bishop died in Boston in 1979.