John Freeman was born in Essex, grew up in south London, studied in Cambridge and lived in Yorkshire before moving to Wales, where for many years he taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Cardiff University. He lives in the Vale of Glamorgan. Worple published A Suite for Summer in 2007, followed in 2016 by What Possessed Me, which won the Roland Matthias Award and the poetry section of the Wales Book of the Year awards in 2017. Other collections include The Light Is Of Love, I Think: New and Selected Poems (Stride), and Landscape With Portraits (Redbeck). Stride also published a book of essays, The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets.