Born near Liverpool, John Latham worked for over 40 years as a research scientist specialising in cloud formation. A recipient of several medals from the Royal Meteorological Society, he was, for eight years, president of the International Commission on Atmospheric Electricity, and founded the Atmospheric Physics Research Group at UMIST (which later became the University of Manchester’s Centre for Atmospheric Science). In 1988 he moved to the US, to become a Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Latham is the author of six collections of poetry, including All-Clear (Peterloo Poets, 1990) and Sailor Boy (The Collective Press, 2006), as well as short fiction, one novel – Ditch-Crawl (Comma, 2006) and several radio plays, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His poetry has won first prize in over 20 competitions, and the title poem for his latest collection From Professor Murasaki’s Notebooks on the Effects of Lightning on the Human Body won second prize in the UK’s 2006 National Poetry Competition.