John Greening

John Greening is a poet, critic and editor who has spent much of his life teaching adults and young people — in Scotland, the USA, and Cambridgeshire. Two years as a volunteer in Upper Egypt led to his first collection, Westerners and in 2017 to his memoir, Threading a Dream. Subsequent books include Hunts: Poems 1979–2009, To the War Poets (Carcanet, 2013 — a further collection is due in 2019), a new edition of Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (OUP, 2015), the Selected Poems of Geoffrey Grigson (Greenwich Exchange, 2017) and poetry anthologies as diverse as Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers and Ten Poems about Sheds. Music is one of his preoccupations (he worked at BBC Radio 3): a song-cycle of his poems was performed at Wigmore Hall and he is collaborating with baritone Roderick Williams on his Schubert Project. Frequently invited to judge competitions and awards such as the Eric Gregory and for twenty years a TLS reviewer of poetry, John Greening has published several critical guides (on Elizabethan poets, Yeats, Hardy, Edward Thomas, Ted Hughes and WW1 Poetry). His Poetry Masterclass emerged from creative writing workshops he ran in Cornwall (he has tutored for Arvon and the Poetry School) and he recently collaborated with Penelope Shuttle on a book of Heathrow poems, Heath. His plays include one about the Lindbergh kidnap (staged in Asheville, USA), and a modern masque composed for Hawthornden Fellows. John Greening has won the Bridport and the TLS prizes, and in 2008 a Cholmondeley Award.