By 1956, he rented the top-floor flat at 10, Compayne Gardens, Hampstead, (51°32′47″N 0°10′56″W / 51.5463°N 0.1822°W / 51.5463; -0.1822), the house of Bernice Rubens, who later won the Booker Prize, and her husband Rudolf Nassauer, also a published novelist, later.
Silkin, in turn, sublet rooms to, among others, David Mercer, later a prolific TV and West End dramatist, and Malcolm Ross-Macdonald, then a diploma student at the Slade School of Fine Art and later a novelist; his first novel, The Big Waves (Cape, 1962) is a roman à clef of life in that flat, in which Silkin features as "Somes Arenstein".
He lectured and taught widely, both in Britain and abroad (in among other places the United States, Israel, and Japan).
[6] He began an association with the University of Leeds in 1958, when he was awarded, as a mature student, a two-year Gregory Fellowship, and where he read for a degree in English.
The poets included were: Dannie Abse – David Avidan – John Barrell – Wendell Berry – John Berryman – Alexander Blok – Johannes Bobrowski – Bertolt Brecht – T. J. Brindley – Joseph Brodsky – Alan Brownjohn – León Felipe – Antonio Cisneros – Peter Dale – Gunnar Ekelöf – Hans Magnus Enzensberger – Roy Fisher – Paavo Haavikko – John Haines – Michael Hamburger – Tony Harrison – John Haynes – John Heath-Stubbs – Zbigniew Herbert – Nazim Hikmet – Geoffrey Hill – Anselm Hollo – Miroslav Holub – Peter Huchel – Philip Levine – Emanuel Litvinoff – George MacBeth – Sorley Maclean – Christopher Middleton – Ewart Milne – Norman Nicholson – Tom Pickard – Maila Pylkkönen – Miklós Radnóti – Tom Raworth – Tadeusz Różewicz – Pentti Saarikoski – Jon Silkin – Iain Crichton Smith – Ken Smith – Vladimir Soloukhin – William Stafford – Marina Tsvetayeva – Giuseppe Ungaretti – César Vallejo – Andrei Voznesensky – Jeffrey Wainwright – Ted Walker – Nathan Whiting – James Wright – Yevgeny Yevtushenko – Natan Zach