Born in 1942, John Welch lives in Hackney in East London. Prior to his first collection from Shearsman in 2004 collections of his poems had appeared from Anvil, infernal methods and Reality Street. In 1975 he founded The Many Press which published many books and pamphlets of new poetry. There was also a magazine, The Many Review. Writings on his personal experience of psychoanalysis appeared in Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991 (Macmillan 1992), and in magazines including The London Review of Books and fragmente. Much of this material was subsequently incorporated into his Shearsman prose memoir Dreaming Arrival. Book reviews and articles on a variety of other topics have appeared in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Reader, Scintilla and elsewhere. For many years he worked as a teacher of English as a Second Language in east London schools and in 1984 an anthology he edited, Stories from South Asia appeared from OUP. He has worked closely with Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan on English versions of his poems and some of these appeared in his collection Sonata for Four Hands (Arc, 2010). His Collected Poems appeared from Shearsman in 2008 and since then there have been two further Shearsman collections. He is currently working with the London-based Iraqi poet Abdulkareem Kasid on English versions of his poems. A selection of these, Cafes , appeared in 2012.