John’s poetry collection, Reckless Paper Birds, has won this year’s £15,000 Hawthornden prize for literature.
The prize is awarded annually for a work published in the previous twelve months. Previous winners include V.S Naipaul, Graham Greene and Vita Sackville-West.
Announcing the win on his Facebook page John said that it had been a unanimous decision by the judges: “Not bad for a working-class boy from Watford, eh? 
The collection had previously been shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Awards.
