short bio (for press releases etc)
Jon Stone was born in Derby and lives in London. His poems have appeared in anthologies of imitation, formal innovation, science fiction, erotic and comic book poetry. School of Forgery (Salt, 2012) brings all these elements together, while he also collates, collaborates and anthologises through Sidekick Books, the small press he runs with Kirsten Irving. He won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Poetry London competition in 2014.
full bio
Jon was born in Derby in 1983 and studied English Literature with Creative Writing in Norwich. He lived in Whitechapel for six years before moving to Blackheath. He works part time as a court transcript editor (or scopist1, in US terminology), and has covered cases including the Leveson Inquiry and the Archer Inquiry into NHS Supplied Contaminated Blood and Blood Products.
For the other part of the time, he works mostly as a writer and small publisher. In 2005, he started the arts journal Fuselit alongside Kirsten Irving, and in 2009 the pair began publishing collaborative anthologies of poetry and illustration under the imprint Sidekick Books. As well as being an editor and occasional contributor to these books, Jon handles the design, copy writing and picture editing elements and builds and maintains the related websites.
Chimerium, a bonus booklet produced for an issue of Fuselit, lets you mix and match different poets. Each page is cut into three sections.
After being published in a wide range of journals and magazines (including a short story in Bizarre), he was highly commended in the 2009 National Poetry Competition for 'Jake Root', a poem about a dying man's demands for ginger. Following this, he authored a variety of electronic and print pamphlets, some collaboratively, starting with Scarecrows (Happenstance, 2010). He was commended again in the 2011 National Poetry Competition and won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012. A full length collection, School of Forgery, was published by Salt in the same year and was a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation, with the selectors calling it "inspired, integrated debut, endlessly inventive". He won the Poetry London Competition in 2014 with 'Nightjar', and also composed two poems (one in collaboration with Abigail Parry) for the Southbank Centre's Pull Out All The Stops festival.
His poetry has also been included in numerous anthologies, including City State: New London Poetry (Penned in the Margins, 2009), The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt, 2011), Split Screen (Red Squirrel Press, 2012) and Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012), and he has written articles for the National Association of Writers in Education, Poetry News and Cereal: Geek, among others.
Sketch for Fuselit: Jack
Jon has a keen interest in collaborative writing experiments. He conceived and put together the supplementary booklets that have been packaged with later issues of Fuselit, including Chimerium, which allowed you to mix and match parts of poems by a variety of poets, and Telemorphics, in which Hugo Williams, Kathryn Simmonds, Emily Berry and others all 'translated' each other's work. This interest carries over into his work with Sidekick Books - Riotous, a collection of tropical zoo sonnets written with Irving, won the Saboteur Award for best collaboration in 2014.
Jon also has a tentative sideline in illustration. In 2010, he produced illustrated poems as part of the inaugural exhibition at The Gopher Hole in Shoreditch, and in early 2011, he contributed to A New Face, a pan-European collaborative art project incorporating the work of over 220 artists over the span of a decade. You can view a selection of the results here.
His other hobbies include bouldering, Transformers comics, holding forth on various matters, and, lately, urbexing.