Glenn Telfer

Even when I was a wee boy throwing stones and playing street football I wanted to be a writer. And all the while I thought I was living my life backwards and sideways I was actually tracing a Celtic knotwork to here.

I am now almost fully grown, being born in 1956 in working-class Glasgow (from Kinning Park, Dennistoun and Ibrox, if you're asking). The hammer and tongs, coal-powered world I grew up in is as gone as Troy, and with it the industrial working class that served it. What seemed so solid and forever, disappeared almost overnight and is rapidly becoming unknowable except through people like me. The hasty departure of a way of life and its replacement by globalized uncertainty is both the background to my life and the raw material of my art. Considering what's gone, what's here, what's yet to come is what I'm about; itemising the bill of life through my writing.

My poetry deliberately explores themes, rather than being collections of miscellany. This is how my mind works; I take (or, more properly an idea suggests itself) and I journey with it until I run out of track. Or steam.

I cover all the usual suspects in my writing, but, being a teacher, pay particular attention to education. There is a terrible fascination to be had inside the chaos of this institution as it tears itself to pieces.

I bring a sensibility that is 20th century British and, probably more self-consciously, Scottish to what I write. I have always enjoyed writers whose work is rooted in both setting and idiom, and delighted in the uniqueness thus presented; I have tried to do the same.