Café des Artistes

John Hartley Williams is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist and critic. He has published nine collections of poetry, including Blues (2004), two of which have been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize and he won the Arvon International Poetry Competition in 1983. He has also written a romance, Mystery in Spiderville (2002), and co-edited Teach Yourself Writing Poetry. He teaches English at the Free University of Berlin and has lived in Berlin since 1976.

"He is a strong, sophisticated, funny original. Since 1983, the poems in his collections have explored sex, politics, the wild west, and language in a wide range of styles: formal, direct, swashbucklingly experimental. The mix of traditionalism and ignoring convention shakes you into reading with fresh eyes and mind" -- Ruth Padel "Williams's great skill is to make the places and people he's writing about seem to be absolutely central to the concerns of poetry, now and always" -- Ian McMillan "His poetry comes at you from any angle. You could no more predict what he will do next - from one collection to another, from one poem to another - than you can know whether or why Cootie Williams will come after Johnny Hodges or Tricky Sam or Harry Carney. About the only thing you can be sure of is that whatever he serves up will be well worth reading" -- John Lucas Other Poetry "John Hartley Williams, still resident in Berlin, has the most recognisably English voice... open to both the influence of European poetry and a very British absurdism, both of which mark him as at his own precise angle to the mainstream" -- W.N.Herbert Poetry London "One of our finest contemporary poets" -- Steve Spence Tears in the Fence