‘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, poet, editor, celebrant and teacher 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 other-than-human worlds.

Winner of the Laurie Lee, Geoffrey Dearmer, International Dylan Thomas Day and Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry prizes, my work is published internationally including in The Poetry Review, The Rialto, 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) 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 work-in-progress, ‘Source Material’.

My first full poetry collection Red Handed is out now with 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 have been working at Sladebank Woods near Stroud, a semi-urban/semi-rural community woodland located between a housing estate and the Cotswold Hills. My new pamphlet FOREST will be 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.

Photo credit (above): George Brooks

‘Glos Mythos is a wholly immersive, bewitching experience and was one of the most-lauded shows at Stroud Book Festival 2023. I was utterly transported by the creative meld of poetry, prose and music, and could watch it over and over again.’

Caroline Sanderson, Programme Director, Stroud Book Festival