Stanley Todd Swift was born in Montreal, on Good Friday, 1966 (three months premature) and grew up in St-Lambert, Quebec, where he attended Chambly County High School. Professionally and personally, he is known as "Todd Swift", having dropped his first name in childhood. His mother, Mary Margaret Hume, was a teacher, and his father, Thomas Edward Swift (d.2006), a recording artist, then Director of Admissions for Sir George Williams, later Concordia University. He has one brother, Jordan, ex-bassist with successful Canadian Ska-band The Kingpins, now a teacher. His grandfather, Ian Hume (d.2006) is one of Canada's best known athletics figures and was Head Official for the Montreal Olympics Track & Field events, in 1976. At the age of eighteen Swift became confirmed as an Anglican.

Swift was a champion debater in high school, at Marianopolis CEGEP and then Concordia University, where we was elected President of CUSID, the national body of student intercollegiate debating. In 1987 he visited Belfast to research his first anthology, Map-Maker's Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland (1988), co-edited with Martin Mooney. In 1988 he founded the influential New McGill Reading Series with William Furey. In 1990 he joined The League of Canadian Poets, and was twice 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. 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 an Irish barrister in Ireland, he moved to London, England.

Swift is poetry editor of award-winning online magazine Nthposition and contributing editor of Matrix, Quebec's longest running English-language literary magazine,. Swift's own poetry has been collected in four collections, Budavox (1999), Café Alibi (2002), Rue du Regard (2004) and Winter Tennis. His poems are published widely in journals including Acumen, Agenda, Atlas, Books In Canada, Chapman, The Cimarron Review, Cordite, The Daily Telegraph, Geist, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, London Magazine, Jacket, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Prism International, The SHOp, 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 (The Enchanted Way and The Poetry Program). 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 Great Britain's Poet-in-residence since 2004. He often reviews for Books In Canada; reviews of his have also appeared in The Dubliner, The Globe and Mail, LRC, Magma, and Poetry Review. He is a Core Tutor with the Poetry School. He has an MA in Creative Writing, from the University of East Anglia, where he is doing doctoral research in Creative and Critical Writing.

Recent publications include Language Acts (a collection of essays on Anglo-Quebec Poetry 1976-2006), Vehicule Press, 2007, co-edited with Dr.
Jason Camlot. Forthcoming publications include: New & Selected Poems, from Salmon (Ireland), 2008; and The Carcanet Book of 20th Century Canadian Verse, as editor, end of the decade. He lives in London, England, where he is a visiting lecturer at Kingston University and Birkbeck.

Swift's main interests are: poetry, politics, popular music, current affairs, cinema, the Internet, and theology, and their various intersections. In summer he runs and swims, in the winter he cross-country skiis. He has travelled widely in Europe and North America, and been to both Panama City and Tokyo.