Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911. Her early years were marked by significant loss: her father passed away before she turned one, and her mother was institutionalized when Bishop was just five. She spent part of her childhood with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and part with an aunt in Massachusetts—this divided upbringing instilled in her a lasting preoccupation with themes of displacement and belonging.
At Vassar College, she met the poet Marianne Moore, forging a friendship that would become one of the most significant relationships in her literary journey. Moore acted as a mentor and sounding board, but Bishop remained committed to nurturing her own distinct voice instead of mimicking Moore's style.
“After college, Bishop had a restless period of travel.”
She lived in New York, Key West, and Mexico before finally settling in Brazil in 1951, where she spent nearly twenty years with her partner, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Brazil provided her with a stability she had rarely experienced, and many of her most acclaimed poems were inspired by that environment and her life there. The death of Lota in 1967 left Bishop heartbroken, prompting her eventual return to the United States, where she taught at Harvard in her later years.
Though her body of work is modest—four slender collections throughout her lifetime—the quality remains consistently remarkable. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for *Poems: North & South / A Cold Spring*, the National Book Award in 1970 for *The Complete Poems*, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. From 1949 to 1950, she served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now recognized as Poet Laureate.
