The Silence

John Greening was brought up near Heathrow, and studied at Swansea, Mannheim and Exeter. Having worked for BBC Radio 3 under Hans Keller, he then joined Voluntary Service Overseas. He and his wife were sent to teach in Aswan, Upper Egypt for two years, and he was awarded the Alexandria Poetry Prize before publication of his earliest books, Westerners (Hippopotamus Press, 1982) and The Tutankhamun Variations (Bloodaxe, 1991). A dozen further collections followed, notably Hunts: Poems 1979-2009 (Greenwich Exchange, 2009), and To the War Poets (Carcanet, 2013). Over the last decades, he has edited the work of Edmund Blunden and Geoffrey Grigson, produced several anthologies, and written studies of Elizabethan Love Poets, Yeats, Hardy, First World War Poets, Edward Thomas and Ted Hughes. Among other awards, he has won an Arvon (judged by Hughes and Heaney), the Bridport and a Cholmondeley. A long-time reviewer for the TLS and an Eric Gregory judge, he has appeared at the British Academy and Shakespeare's Globe, performing his own work or talking about other people's, and has contributed to various radio and television programmes. Collaborations include the sequence, Heath, with Penelope Shuttle, libretti for composers Cecilia McDowall and Philip Lancaster, and contributions to baritone Roderick Williams's Schubert Project. Since retiring from teaching, John Greening has held several Fellowships, most recently for the RLF at Newnham College, Cambridge.