Ralph Pite is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. He has published extensively on Thomas Hardy, including the biography, Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (2007) and Hardy's Geography: Wessex and the Regional Novel (2002). He has also published on classical reception and on ecocriticism, particularly in connection with the Romantic period; he is currently completing a study of the poetry of water. He developed the smartphone app,
Romantic Bristol: Writing the City, first launched in 2013, and is a published poet.