I’m a poet and consider myself to generally be a regular man. I’m a dog and a cat person. Pretty much all cheese that isn’t boring and bland is disgusting to me. I still haven’t shown my parents half my tattoos and I’m 32. I tend to get a bit obsessed with one band or book at a time. Right now, that’s a band called Caroline, and books about the breakup of the Soviet Union. 

A book I always come back to is The Gower Coast by George Edmunds, a history of the coastline near where my Dad was brought up. Some of the facts and stories in the book are small, and some are big. Some truthful, some legend. But all are about lives lived, by normal people- working people. Heroism. Cowardice. Survival. Death. 

I’ve always written but tried to keep things private, because of the soupy combination of self-doubt and protecting privacy. That’s moved steadily through keeping scraps of poems in my backpack to notebooks hidden like secret diaries, and now poems in iPhone notes. I love the frantic cut-up thoughts just before sleep, that’s my favourite time to write. It’s also when I’m least motivated to put anything down. But there’s something freeing about thinking something is good, wanting to write it down but losing to sleep, then never remembering it again.

His debut poetry collection, Dad Head, will be published later this year.