‘a rising star’ The Bookseller

‘The literary daughter of Alan Garner – female psychogeography, a rallying call to protect not only the land, but our right to roam.’

Laline Paull, author of Pod, The Bees, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

‘JLM Morton is an astonishing and important writer - fusing exquisite lyricism with urgent, politically aware themes.’

Anna Saunders, Director Cheltenham Poetry Festival

‘[Morton’s poetry is] exceptional both in its poise and in its vivid metaphoric hold.’

Niall Campbell, Judge Geoffrey Dearmer Prize

‘spot on nature writing … reminiscent of Amy Liptrot’

Judges, Nan Shepherd Prize

I’m a writer, creative producer and celebrant based near Stroud in Gloucestershire, England. My work explores contemporary rural experience and belonging, ancestry, place and practices of care, repair and solidarity across human and more-than-human worlds.

Winner of a number of awards including the Laurie Lee, Geoffrey Dearmer, Poetry Archive Worldview and Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust prizes, my work is published internationally including in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Poetry London, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Sunday Telegraph, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Bad Lilies, berlin lit, Anthropocene and in the anthologies Living With Water (Manchester University Press, 2023), Twenty One Poems About Wonky Animals (Candlestick Press, 2024) and Places of Poetry (One World, 2021). In 2024 I was Highly Commended by the Forward Prizes, longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, the London Magazine Poetry Competition and for the Nan Shepherd Prize in September 2023 for nonfiction. Collaboration is fast becoming one of the greatest joys of my creative life - recently it’s been all about Lost Mythos and Living Matter, projects that were seeded by the poems in Red Handed.

My first full poetry collection Red Handed is published by Broken Sleep Books (May 2024). Red Handed explores England’s rural textile heritage with a decolonising lens, picking apart the global threads and entanglements that were created and enforced by British colonial rule. In the second half of the collection I explore ways of coming to terms with this legacy and how belonging might be found in the ruins through an attachment to place. These poems reach back to the deep time of an ancient Celtic past and forgotten indigenous women’s rites and rituals.

In 2024 -2025 I worked at Sladebank Woods near Stroud, a semi-urban/semi-rural community woodland located between a housing estate and the Cotswold Hills. My latest pamphlet FOREST came out in April 2025 (Yew Tree Press) and recounts the legend of the black pine that was the first tree to arrive in the young woodland. Told in free verse and fifty cinquains which accumulate through the pages to create a forest, this long poem explores the tree’s experience of migrating across Europe to set root in the woods at a time of escalating conflict and climate emergency.

Borrowed Ground, my second full poetry collection, is out with Broken Sleep Books (2026). Rooted in the woodland and river country of the west of England, the poems move between close observation and myth: a central creation sequence follows a black pine through litany and shaped, fragmenting text, while a closing sequence stages the drowning and mythic rebirth of Sabrina, goddess of the Severn. The poems work works through erasure, found material, and liturgical forms without losing lyric precision, holding ecological dread against humour, domestic comfort, and ancient, feminist modes of knowing.

My first nonfiction book was pre-empted by Profile Books and will be out in Spring 2027. I’m represented by the brilliant Matt Turner at Rogers, Coleridge & White.

Photo credit (above): Stephen Moore