Biography

John Latham has published 5 collections of poetry in the UK, 4 with Harry Chambers / Peterloo Poets, and one with the Collective Press. 

He has won first prize in more than 20 national poetry competitions in the UK, and has frequently been a tutor to both the Arvon Foundation and the Taliesin Trust, UK, on 5-day residential creative writing courses.  His poems (also radio stories and plays) have appeared on BBC national radio and TV, UK. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1990, and his poem Construction on the Queen’s Highway won the A.E. Housman Cup in 2002. His Poem From Professor Nobu Kitagawa’s Notebooks on the Effects of Lightning on the Human Body won second prize (out of 12,000 entries) in the UK’s most venerable and prestigious competition, The National Poetry Competition, in 2007.

He has worked extensively in schools, led many poetry writing workshops and often given poetry readings.  He has taught poetry in prisons, and had writer-in-residence appointments.  His first novel, Ditch-Crawl, was published in 2005.