Peter Reading (27 July 1946 – 17 November 2011[1]) was an English poet and the author of 26 collections of poetry.
[2] Widely regarded as an influential alternative presence on the UK poetry scene, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry describes his verse as "strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical".
[3] Interviewed by Robert Potts, he described his work as a combination of "painstaking care" and "misanthropy".
[5] 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.
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[6] – his filmed readings for Lannan (made in 2001 and 2010) of 26 poetry collections make up the only archive of its kind.