John Greening (born 20 March 1954 in Chiswick, London) is an English poet, critic, playwright and teacher. He has published over twenty poetry collections large and small, including To the War Poets (2013) and The Silence (2019), both from Carcanet Press. He has edited a major illustrated edition of Edmund Blunden’s war memoir, Undertones of War, for Oxford University Press and produced editions of poetry by Geoffrey Grigson and Iain Crichton Smith. His anthologies include Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers from Thomas Tallis to Arvo Pärt and Hollow Palaces (selected modern country house poems co-edited with Kevin Gardner for Liverpool University Press, 2021). He has reviewed poetry for the Times Literary Supplement since the 1990s. His collected reviews and essays, Vapour Trails (Shoestring Press), appeared late in 2020. He is a recipient of the Alexandria International Poetry Prize (1981), the Bridport Prize (1998), the TLS Centenary Prize (2001) and a Cholmondeley Award (2008).
Background
John Greening was born in Chiswick and brought up in Kew and Hounslow. He attended Wellington Primary School and Isleworth Grammar School. Greening studied English Literature at Swansea University. He won a studentship to the University of Mannheim in Germany and then spent a year at the University of Exeter, where he wrote a dissertation on verse drama for his M.A. He married Jane Woodland in 1978.
He has written a series of plays, one of which, about Robert Louis Stevenson, was awarded Best New Play at the Edinburgh Festival. Another, about the Lindbergh kidnapping, was premiered in Asheville, North Carolina in 2002. Others he has staged with young people while teaching at Kimbolton School, and he took a one-man play about Gordon of Khartoum to the Edinburgh Fringe in 1984. He corresponded about his early verse plays with Ronald Duncan and with Ted Hughes. His first play was staged in Exeter – about Robert Schumann.
Greening has taught for much of his life, including two years with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in Aswan, Upper Egypt. Shortly before leaving in 1981, he was awarded the Alexandria International Poetry Prize and received the medal and papyrus certificate from Jehan Sadat on the site of the ancient Pharos. In 1983, after some time teaching Vietnamese boat people in northeastern Scotland, he and Jane moved to Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire (originally Huntingdonshire) where they have lived ever since – apart from a year on a Fulbright exchange in New Jersey 1990-91 – and where their two daughters were born. Greening taught for many years at Kimbolton School and established a poetry reading series at Kimbolton Castle. He has tutored all ages for the Indian King Arts Centre in Camelford, Cornwall, for the Arvon Foundation and currently for the Poetry School in Cambridge, where he was until recently RLF Writing Fellow at Newnham College.
Poetry publications
Greening’s first poems were published in Emma Tennant’s Bananas, and his earliest Egyptian-themed poems appeared in Poetry Review. In the early 1980s, he received a Scottish Arts Council Award while living in Arbroath. His first collection was published in 1982. He has published over twenty collections, most recently the pamphlets Achill Island Tagebuch, Europa’s Flight, Moments Musicaux (Poetry Salzburg, 2020) and the two full Carcanet Press collections, To the War Poets (2013) and The Silence (2019), the latter featuring his long poem about Jean Sibelius. Earlier books include his 1991 Bloodaxe collection, The Tutankhamun Variations, the more pastoral sequences of Fotheringhay and Other Poems, The Coastal Path and The Bocase Stone, then in 1998 a first "Selected" – Nightflights – and two long poems: Gascoigne’s Egg (Cargo Press, 2000) and Omm Sety, both of which showed a growing interest in the occult. The substantial collection The Home Key appeared in 2003, followed in 2008 by Iceland Spar (the result of a pilgrimage to Akureyri, sponsored by the Society of Authors). These were followed by a more substantial "Selected" – Hunts: Poems 1979-2009 – and the chapbook Knot In 2016, there was a Heathrow collaboration with Penelope Shuttle, Heath A further collaboration, consisting of thirty-five years’ holiday sonnets exchanged with Stuart Henson, a Postcard to, appeared in December 2020, while his pamphlet The Giddings appeared in March 2021. The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems, edited by Kevin Gardner, was published in March 2023 by Baylor University Press.