Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2021

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Named as one of The Times' Notable New Poetry Books 2022

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Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2021 • Named as one of The Times' Notable New Poetry Books 2022 •

These poems put personal and cultural anxiety under the microscope. They are full of things that shimmer, quiver and fizz: plankton glowing at low tide; brain tissue turning to glass; a basketball emerging from the waves, covered in barnacles. Moving beyond the breathlessness of panic towards luminescence and solidarity, this formally innovative new collection sees McCullough at the peak of his powers.

  • Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize & Shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award

    With a magpie’s eye for hidden charms, these exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic, parallel world of ‘vomit and blossom’ where Kate Bush mingles with a weeping Lady Gaga, a ‘fractal coast’ full of see-through things: water, mirrors, glass pebbles.

    (Read a sample here.)

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  • Shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize, Guardian Best Books for Summer 2016, Longlisted for the Green Carnation Prize

    Encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton’s gay scene, Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection which navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people.

    (Read a sample here.)

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  • Winner of the 2012 Polari Prize, A Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School, & Holiday Read in The Observer

    The Frost Fairs is a compassionate book with a global and historical scope, tackling science and city life from a range of surreal yet poignant angles.

    It explores love in many forms, from modern transatlantic relationships to hidden gay and cross-gendered lives from the past.

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ABOUT ME

 
 
 

Banging words together like stones
and seeing what sparks.

When I'm not writing, I teach creative writing courses at the University of Brighton, the Arvon Foundation and New Writing South. I have a PhD in English literature from the University of Sussex after writing a thesis on the rhetoric of friendship in Renaissance writing, 1579-1625. My interests include queer culture, Doctor Who and most things to do with Japan. I grew up in Watford but now live in Hove with my partner Morgan Case and our cats.

 

  • “Mindblowingly excellent. It left me breathless.”

    - Eric Page -

  • "John McCullough has a reputation for crafting lyric poems of the everyday with a surreal twist. In Reckless Paper Birds, the familiar yet strange is rarely more than a stanza away. As if Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems jumped headlong into our 21st century, McCullough's lines sing of Lady Gaga, Instagram and house music."

    - Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian -

  • "John McCullough is a poet you need to know."

    - Sarah Howe -

  • "McCullough seeks out light and lightness to lift the weight of insecurity. Inspired by his seaside home in Brighton, he is the laureate of plankton and flotsam, finding salvation in tree-lined parks or the crumbling splendour of regency houses."

    - Graeme Richardson, The Times -