John Weston spent 36 years in the Diplomatic Service, and has lived and worked in China, continental Europe and the United States. He retired from public service as UK Ambassador to the United Nations in 1998. Since then he has pursued a mixed bag of activities in the corporate, charity, arts and education sectors. He is an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.
 
He has had many poems published in national journals and magazines since 2002. He won First Prize in the 20th Peterloo Annual Open Competition in 2004 and, in 2005, he won First Prize and had a commended poem in the York Open Poetry Competition judged by Michael Longley.
 
He appeared as one of five voices in the Shoestring Press anthology Take Five 04 in October 2004. His first collection (Chasing The Hoopoe) was published by Peterloo Poets in August 2005. He chaired the Poetry School from 2005 to 2008. He was a Trustee and Council member of The Poetry Society from 2005 to 2008. His second collection, published by Shoestring Press, is Echo Soundings (February 2012).
 
His poetry reading fixtures have included the following venues: National Portrait Gallery (with Andrew Motion), The Troubadour, The Barbican Library, The Cochrane Theatre, Lauderdale House, Peterloo Festival at Calstock, Mere Literary Festival, and Richmond on Thames ‘Book Now’ Festival.
 
Credit for Echo Soundings:
 

Clear-cut, classical…funny… In his beekeeping sequence, a sharp eye and a playful tongue… He uses poems as a way of cutting through received ideas, the insolence of wealth and public complacency. Echo Soundings does what the title says. An impressive collection.

 

Grey Gowrie

 
 

Weston engages with the full range of poetic curiosities, with knowledge and yet a modest voice… Bee poems have become an urgent vehicle for questioning society’s relationship with nature… Through Weston’s tender record of his year’s husbandry we learn much about the actual keeping of bees…

 

Stephanie Norgate, Poetry Review

 
 

The feeling for language is simply perfect… This is not a matter of technique alone. It is the poetry of acute sensibility…

 

Geoffrey Heptonstall, The London Magazine

 
 

At the heart of this collection is an excellent sequence … recording a first year of keeping bees… [it] has the same freshness and absence of symbolic import as Hughes’s Moortown sequence…

 

Martyn Crucefix, Magma

 
 

Weston has been closer to political realities than most of us… He brings a classically informed eloquence to the hypocrisies of public life… explored most powerfully in At A Tangent, the first part of Echo Soundings … Two further sequences – Bee Lines and Signatures are more private and elegiac…

 

William Bedford, The Warwick Review

 
 

Very good indeed. I greatly enjoyed it.

 

Kit Wright

 
 

Credits for Chasing the Hoopoe:
 

Poems consistently engaging, and displaying a high level of technical accomplishment.

 

John Mole

 
 

Weston’s poetry is generous and capacious… a collection whose quality is refreshing and enlarging.

 

D M Black, Poetry London

 
 

There is a poignancy… but a wry humour too… His gift for elegy is considerable.

 

John Greening, The London Magazine

 
 

John (born 1938) is married with three children and six grandchildren. His wife Sally was for six years a member of the Independent Monitoring Board at Wandsworth Prison. John was knighted in 1992. They live in Richmond on Thames.