Born 1942, John Welch lives in Hackney in east London. In the seventies he was involved with Wallpaper, a collaborative magazine founded by poet and performance artist Anthony Howell, which brought together work by poets, visual artists and musicians. In 1975 he founded The Many Press, a poetry publisher which over the next twenty years published many books, pamphlets and broadsheets. There was also a magazine The Many Review, devoted to criticism of new and recent poetry. A full list of the Press's output can be seen at shadoof.net. He contributed an article 'Dream and Restoration', on the subject of poetry and psychoanalysis, to Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991 edited by Denise Riley (Macmillan 1992) and since then other writings touching on his personal experience of psychoanalysis have appeared in The London Review of Books, Scintilla, fragmente and elsewhere. Until his retirement in 1996 he worked as a teacher, mainly teaching English as a Second Language in various East London schools. At the same time he helped run the South Asian Literature Society, an organisation that promoted interest in the literatures of the Indian Subcontinent, and he edited an anthology of Asian literature Stories from South Asia (Oxford University Press 1984).
