Alan Jackson

Who is Alan Jackson?

Alan Jackson is a Scottish poet.

He was born in Liverpool, of Scottish parents in 1938 who returned to Edinburgh in 1940. He attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh 1952-1956 and Edinburgh University 1956-1959. He began a reading career on Edinburgh Festival fringe, with the London poets, Pete Brown, Mike Horovitz and Libby Houston in 1960. He self-published Underwater Wedding in 1961.

In 1965 he founded the yearly series of readings during the Edinburgh Festival in the Traverse Theatre. These readings became a platform for the Liverpool poets, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough and for the older Scottish poets Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Norman McCaig. Hamish Henderson brought folk singers. Pentangle played there, and The Scaffold. Poets such as Pete Morgan and Pete Roche first appeared at these Traverse readings.

Jackson went on from this time till the early seventies to give hundreds of readings throughout Britain, often solo, but mostly with Patten, Mitchell, Morgan, Houston and others of the poets mentioned above.

In 1968 he was published in Penguin Modern Poets 12 and in 1969 by the avant garde Fulcrum Press.