Poetic Obituaries: [Peter Reading's] first full poetry collection,

For the Municipality's Elderly, was published in 1974. More books followed until one day a new weighbridge boss told him to put on a uniform. He refused and was sacked.

From then on he lived off his writing as best he could. He remained in Shropshire, most recently in Ludlow. Two awards from the Lannan Foundation in the US (he was the only British poet to be honoured twice) and the support of Bloodaxe, his publishers, kept him going. Every year, perhaps one or two poems of three lines or four would appear in the Times Literary Supplement. BBC Radio 3 occasionally commissioned longer sequences.

from The Guardian: Peter Reading obituary
then The Times Literary Supplement: Then and Now, 1995

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