His works include a Scots translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the poetry books Accent o the Mind, Life Sentence, and A Map for the Blind.
[1] He held an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board, working at Barony Pit in Ayrshire, but gave up mining as a result of the UK miners' strike (1984–1985) and instead trained as a psychiatric nurse.
Wilson worked on the project Burnsiana with Calum Colvin[8] and discovered that Burns may have taken part of Tam O' Shanter from English poet Edmund Bolton.
[3] In 2009 he jokingly threatened to behead Conservative politician Kenneth Baker while giving the address to the haggis at the Wordsworth Trust Book Festival Burns Night.
[1][14] Burnsiana is a collaboration with artist Calum Colvin, producing an art exhibition and book featuring poems written by Wilson in response to the work of Robert Burns.