Name John Muckle | Role Writer | |
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Books The Cresta run, Firewriting & other poems, It is now as it was then | ||
John Muckle (born 9 December 1954) is a writer who has published fiction, poetry and literary criticism.
Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, he grew up in the village of Cobham, Surrey. After qualifying as a teacher and working in London FE colleges, he moved into book publishing, first for small literary publisher Marion Boyars, moving on to Grafton Books (later subsumed into HarperCollins) as a paperback copywriter. In the mid-1980s he initiated the Paladin Poetry Series. Muckle was General Editor of its flagship anthology The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988), commissioning other titles before leaving in anticipation of the company's dissolution by Rupert Murdoch. The poetry imprint was subsequently edited by London writer Iain Sinclair. He worked as a freelance copywriter before returning to teaching, for five years at Essex University, later on in various other jobs.
The Cresta Run, Muckle's first book, was well-reviewed. Norman Shrapnel wrote in The Guardian: "An identifiable vernacular for this still measurable sector of the populace - working-class if not always working - is amply available and John Muckle's excellent stories prove it. The territory of The Cresta Run is short on dropouts and introverts; it's more a world of sleazy service stations, hot-dog vans and skinheads along the Hog's Back, dangerous sailors hot from the Falklands, people you watch your words with." Of Cyclomotors, John Berger wrote: "It's a wonderful book - marvellously constructed and of a fidelity to experience such as you only come across with a true storyteller."
He has since published fiction and poetry, contributed to literary journals and written essays on poetry, including that of Allen Ginsberg, Ed Dorn, Bill Griffiths, Tom Raworth and Denise Riley. In 1989 he received a Hawthornden Writers' Fellowship.