John Muckle

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John Muckle, 2010

John Muckle (born 9 December 1954) is a British writer who has published fiction, poetry and literary criticism.

Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, he grew up in the village of Cobham, Surrey, and has lived most of his adult life in Essex and London. After qualifying as a teacher and working in FE colleges, Muckle worked in book publishing. He was an editorial copywriter and editor for Grafton Books (later subsumed into HarperCollins) and in the mid-1980s initiated the Paladin Poetry Series. He was the General Editor of its flagship anthology The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988) and commissioned a number of other titles before he left in anticipation of the company's takeover and dissolution by Rupert Murdoch. The poetry imprint was then edited by London writer Iain Sinclair. His own books include It is now as it was then (with Ian Davidson - poetry, Mica Press/Actual Size, 1983), The Cresta Run (short stories - Galloping Dog Press, 1987), Bikers (with Bill Griffiths - Amra Imprint, 1990), Cyclomotors (illustrated novella - Festival Books, 1997), Firewriting and Other Poems (Shearsman Books, 2005) and London Brakes (a novel - Shearsman Books, 2010). His second novel, My Pale Tulip, set partly in Jaywick, Essex, was published in 2012. Muckle contributes regularly to literary journals as reviewer, poet and essayist, and has published a number of essays on poetry, including that of Allen Ginsberg, Ed Dorn, Tom Raworth and Denise Riley. In 1989 he received a Hawthornden Fellowship.

Muckle's first book, The Cresta Run, was well-reviewed. Norman Shrapnel wrote in The Guardian that "An identifiable vernacular for this still measurable sector of the populace - working-class if not always working - is amply available and John Muckle's excellent stories prove it. The territory of The Cresta Run is short on dropouts and introverts; it's more a world of sleazy service stations, hot-dog vans and skinheads along the Hogs Back, dangerous sailors hot from the Falklands, people you watch your words with." In London listings magazine City Limits Nick Kimberley explained that the book was "almost entirely speech-driven" and concerned "people who are not very bright but love country and western; he skilfully catches the rhythms of their talk, not in 'Minder'-style caricature but as an imaginative means to pinpoint their place in this shabby world." Edinburgh Review inferred that Muckle was a post-modernist, or perhaps an apocalypic, and concluded: "But the fetish fashionism surrounding junk, icons, kitsch makes this a collection which is only almost disturbing". Cyclomotors, ten years later, was not widely reviewed, but a number of well-known writers praised it highly, including John Berger ("a wonderful book"), Michael Moorcock, Harold Pinter and Will Self. Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton praised Firewriting, a long poem about Walter Benjamin, as "a deeply impressive poem ... full of riches and depth." On publication of London Brakes, a novel based on the working lives of London's motorcycle couriers, Muckle was attacked by a columnist in the Times Literary Supplement for quoting Pinter's words ("More power to your writing hand") on its front cover. Of My Pale Tulip Ian Brinton wrote in PN Review: "John Muckle's compelling and fast-moving new novel ... has links with Terrence Malick's dream-like film of crime and punishment, Badlands, in which the two youngsters Kit and Holly drift through South Dakota ... a beautifully realised sense of that cinematic drift contained within the cocooned magic of this desperate bid for an escape from the drabness of these teenagers’ fractured Essex backgrounds."

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