His father James (known as Hamish) was an electrician and played the drums in a touring dance band; his mother Elizabeth (known as Betty, née Lumsden, but not related, as he was fond of pointing out) worked in the accommodation service of the university.

Lumsden attended Langlands Primary School where, due to recurring outbreaks of warts on his fingers, his friends nicknamed him Werty.

[7] Together they decided to start an undergraduate poetry magazine, titled Fox, which also featured new work from Liz Lochhead, Norman MacCaig, Ron Butlin, Brian McCabe, and Edwin Morgan.

"[8] In his first year, Lumsden was the singer in a student band called "A Walk Through H", named after the Peter Greenaway film, playing post-punk original songs.

Jackson (vice president) he was responsible for booking various poets to read at the university, and these included Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Andrew Greig, Kathleen Jamie, Craig Raine, and Hugo Williams.

[10] Paul Hullah describes Lumsden in the late 1980s: "He was Black Bo’s [pub, Blackfriars Street, now the Salt Horse], khaki-safari-suited, barrel-chested, dart player polo, touring trivia-machine cracker, erudite in everything.

"[11] Neil Cooper’s first impressions of Lumsden in 1986 pick up on the same fashion elements: "He was probably wearing one of those short-sleeved military style shirts he always wore that we used to tease him made him look like a darts player […] [a] slightly strange guy with a baby-faced stare and facial tics I’d later find out were a side effect from the lithium he was still taking then.

[14] His ubiquitous presence in pubs made him a recognisable figure: "The poet Roddy Lumsden was such a regular at the St James Oyster Bar that mail was occasionally sent to him there.

Roddy – who wrote a fine poem called 'St James Infirmly' – told me: 'If anyone didn’t have my address in the early 1990s, they could be assured that a letter would reach me there, as it was like my second home'.

Here Lumsden met writers who would be a major influence on him during this period including Kevin Williamson, Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, Gordon Legge, Duncan McLean and the poet Paul Reekie.

[19] Between 1995 and 1996 he was Writing Fellow for the City of Aberdeen,[20] and 1995 also saw the publication of a privately-printed, 38-page pamphlet, Elsewhere Perhaps Later, containing many of the poems which would appear in his first full collection, and some (e.g. 'An Engagement', 'from Cavoli Riscaldati') which did not.

Stephen Troussé wrote in Poetry Review: "From the gloomy corners of dank saloons in [the] Cowgate, Lumsden observes the last rites and fist-fights of provincial adolescence with a slangy, slumming formalism which owes as much to Elvis Costello as it does to Simon Armitage […] heavy-handed […] wildly uneven […] the poems pick up when the poet gives his persona the slip.

"[21] Lumsden’s own response to the perceived Armitage influence was as follows: "I suppose there is a similarity; I certainly like his work more than most of my peers seem to do, though they may be informed by sour grapes (jealousy is rife in this little world).

"[22] Neil Powell in the TLS was similarly lukewarm but identified some positive aspects: despite occasional "gear-crashing wrenches of register and patches of dense demotic which read like versified Martin Amis […]"[23] there are also poems of "great delicacy".

He ends the review: "If there is a fault, or a danger, it lies in the feckless charm of a persona which is slightly too pleased with its hard luck and hangovers: one begins, ungratefully, to long for the contrasting tone of some honest, unironic misery, confident that when it arrives Roddy Lumsden will have the technical resources to handle it.

He quickly became known for staging events at The Poetry Society in Covent Garden (he would later serve as the charity’s vice chair) and was part of the second iteration of a writing group that met at The Lamb pub in Bloomsbury – other members of this group included Michael Donaghy, Hugo Williams, Maurice Riordan, Paul Farley, Greta Stoddart and John Stammers.

In 2001 he was awarded an Arts Council of England International Fellowship at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, an experience which he recorded in the poems 'For Jesus', 'Turning Into Grizzly Street' and 'From the Valentine Studio' in Mischief Night.

He was organiser and host of the monthly reading series BroadCast, held upstairs at the Poetry Society offices on Betterton Street, Covent Garden.

Of the latter, Laurie Donaldson in the Glasgow Review of Books noted Lumsden's invention of new poetic forms: kernel poems (e.g. 'The Bells of Hope'), the sevenling ("two sets of three line verses, finishing with a summary line that closes the poem off") and the hebdomad ("nine tercets that draw together separate details and thoughts over a certain time period, the conjunction of which is helped by the coincidences and serendipity of everyday life").

[34] Of the collection as a whole, Donaldson suggests the inventive word-play shows the poems to be "more ludic than febrile [...] Inherent in all this is a musicality, reinforcing Lumsden’s belief that poetry should be read aloud.

[36] Reviewing the book, Alison Craig suggested: "This is poetry as an extreme sport, a whole world of shifting ideas with people – dead and alive – dropping in, whispering in your ear, or just walking right through, bold as brass.

In 2014 he became a regular team member on Radio 4's long running show Round Britain Quiz, representing Scotland alongside crime writer Val McDermid.