Todd Swift is one of the leading Canadian poet-editors of his generation (those born since 1960). He was born in Montreal, on Good Friday, 1966 but grew up in St-Lambert, Quebec, where he attended Chambly County High School. He was a champion debater in high school, at Marianopolis CEGEP and then Concordia University, and the only person to twice win the Top Speaker award at The McGill Winter Carnival International Debating Tournament, one of the largest in North America, as well as The Hart House Tournament – and also placed 9th at the World’s. In 1987 he visited Belfast to research his first (co-edited) anthology, Map-Maker's Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland (1988).

In 1988 he co-founded the influential New McGill Reading Series, with William Furey. In 1990 he joined The League of Canadian Poets, and has twice been elected its Quebec representative. His poetry series Vox Hunt ran from 1995-1997, and was called "Brechtian… virtually unique in North America" by The Globe & Mail.

As a screenwriter (WGC member) he has written over one hundred hours of TV for HBO, Fox, CBC and Paramount, among others, often with Thor Bishopric or Stanley Whyte. Several of his film scripts have been optioned. He received a Young Quebecer of the Year award (Arts & Education category) in 1997. He has been shortlisted more than half a dozen times for the Irving Layton Poetry Prize. Since 1998 he has received two Canada Council grants for poetry, and a Telefilm grant to create a screenplay, Talent Bloom. In 1997, Swift moved to Budapest. In Hungary he was Visiting Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), 1998-2001. In 2001 he moved to Paris. In 2003, after marrying in Ireland, he moved to London, England.

He is poetry editor of award-winning site "Nth Position" and contributing editor of Matrix, Quebec’s longest running English-language literary magazine. Swift’s own poetry has been collected in three critically-acclaimed collections, Budavox (1999), Café Alibi (2002) and Rue du Regard (2004). His writing has appeared widely in journals in Australia, America, Canada, Ireland and the UK, such as Agenda, Books In Canada, Cordite, The Dubliner, En Route, Geist, The Literary Review of Canada, Jacket, The National Post, Poetry London, Prism International and Stand. The Chronicle of Higher Education has compared his work to "that of Ezra Pound's in the 10s and 20s of the last century, in Paris and London". Swift’s poetry is translated into and published in many languages, including French, Croatian, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Arabic, and Korean. His poetry has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBC, and RTE radio. In 2002 he released a CD on the Wired On Words label, with composer Tom Walsh, titled The Envelope, Please. In 2003, Swift edited the chapbook series (In English, French, German and Brazilian versions) 100 Poets Against The War. He was one of the special guest poets at the Frankfurt Book Fair's International Poetry Evening in 2003. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies, including Radio Waves (Enitharmon, UK, 2004), Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea Books, New York, 2005) and The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Véhicule, Montreal, 2005). He has been Oxfam GB Poet-in-residence since 2004. He is a Tutor with the Poetry School. He has an MA (distinction) in Creative Writing, from the University of East Anglia. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer at London Metropolitan University

Todd lives in London, England, with his wife.