Peter Reading
{{short description|English poet and author (1946–2011)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}
Peter Reading (27 July 1946 – 17 November 2011{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8907920/Peter-Reading.html |title=Obituary: Peter Reading |publisher=Daily Telegraph |date= 22 November 2011|accessdate=2011-11-22 |location=London}}) was an English poet and the author of 26 collections of poetry. He is known for his deep interest in nature and the use of classical metres.Keith Tuma, Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001), p. 725. He was widely regarded as an influential alternative presence on the UK poetry scene, and the The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry describes his verse as "strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical".Martin Seymour-Smith "Reading, Peter" in Ian Hamilton (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p.443 Interviewed by Robert Potts, he described his work as a combination of "painstaking care" and "misanthropy".Robert Potts [http://www.oxfordpoetry.co.uk/texts.php?int=v3_peterreading "An Interview with Peter Reading", Oxford Poetry, OP V.3 [Winter 1990] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100312073314/http://www.oxfordpoetry.co.uk/texts.php?int=v3_peterreading |date=2010-03-12 }}
Background
Reading was educated at Alsop High School. After studying painting at Liverpool College of Art, he worked as a schoolteacher at Ruffwood School, Kirkby (1967–68), and at Liverpool College of Art, where he taught Art History (1968–70).{{cite web|url=
https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/peter-reading|title=British Council biography for Peter Reading|access-date=21 September 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230923153003/https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/peter-reading|archive-date=23 September 2023|url-status=live}}{{cite ODNB|id=104389|first=Alan|Brownjohn|title=Reading, Peter Gray (1946–2011)}} He then worked for 22 years as a weighbridge operator at an animal feed mill in Shropshire, a job which left him free to think, until he was sacked for refusing to wear a uniform introduced by new owners of the business. His only break was a two-year residency at Sunderland Polytechnic (1981–83). After leaving Liverpool, he lived for 40 years in various parts of Shropshire, in later years in Little Stretton, near Ludlow.
The benevolence of America’s Lannan Foundation rescued him from poverty. He was the first writer to hold the one-year Lannan writing residency in Marfa, Texas (in 1999), and is the only British poet to have won the Lannan Award for Poetry twice, in 1990 and 2004, as well as the only poet to read an entire life’s work for the Foundation's DVD archive