Born in 1942, John Welch has lived for the last forty years in Hackney in east London, married to the painter Amanda Welch. In 2008 Shearsman Books published his Collected Poems. Shearsman also publishes his memoir Dreaming Arrival, which deals with the author's experience of psychoanalysis. Until his retirement John Welch worked as a teacher, mainly teaching English as a Second Language in local comprehensive schools, and at the same time helped run the South Asian Literature Society, an organisation that promoted interest in the literatures of the Indian Subcontinent. He has worked with the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan, and more recently the Iraqi poet Abdulkarim Kasid, on the English versions of their poems. In 1984 Oxford University Press published his anthology Stories From South Asia. This body of experience contributed substantially to his previous Shearsman collection Visiting Exile, published in 2009.
