John Glenday was born in Broughty Ferry, Scotland in 1952. He is the author of four poetry collections. The Apple Ghost (1989) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; Undark (1995) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; and Grain (2010) was shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. The Golden Mean (2015), was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year and won the 2016 Roehampton Poetry Prize. His Selected Poems appeared with Picador in 2020. Other publications include Mira (with Maria Isakova Bennett) and The Firth (Mariscat Press, 2020).
Glenday has led creative writing workshops and residentials for Moniack Mhor Writers’ Centre, the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry School, and the Banff Centre. He has also worked extensively as a poetry mentor, and currently runs a walking and writing workshop for a mental health charity in Dundee.
Judges’ Citation
Grain is the work of an unhurried craftsman; John Glenday has made poems of understated integrity and humanity.
In John Glenday’s work we hear a calm, confiding voice. This is a mature work, Glenday writes slowly and out of necessity, and in Grain, his third collection, he has achieved a work of wry spiritual authority which never preaches or instructs. Alert to Scottish landscapes and turns of phrase, these poems never send readers away bewildered or confused. We are drawn in to shared confidences. His highly crafted lyrics are like wrought iron, strong but delicate, with a care for assonance and cadence. He listens carefully to the language he works in. They’re also playful: a tin can, a peculiar fish, invented translations, made-up saints all can suggest poems. It’s refreshing to discover a poet whose work is earthly, full of rivers and hills and islands, but where old ideas like ‘love’ and ‘soul’ have not been banished. Grain is the work of an unhurried craftsman; John Glenday has made poems of understated integrity and humanity. Sun through the sea/sea in the heart/heart in its noust/nothing is lost.
Selected poems
by John Glenday
Did we really believe
our love could have survived
on that boat something or other
had us build of spavined cedar
pitched and thatched against the flood,
with two of nothing but ourselves on board –
no raven to hoist behind the rain,
no dove returning with a sprig of green?
Copyright © 2009, John Glenday, Grain, Pan Macmillan/Picador
Ark
Today, I am a new man,
a stranger in the town that bore me.
How simple it is to become a ghost —
just one word, one gesture, and we slip
through the fretwork of other people’s lives
as easily as water through a stone.
Just for today, if I were to pass myself in the street
I wouldn’t even raise my hat, or say hello.
Copyright © 2009, John Glenday, Grain, Pan Macmillan/Picador
Stranger
- Author Website
- Scottish Poetry Library Profile
- Interview with John Glenday Dundee University Review of the Arts
- On Editing: John Glenday and Don Paterson