ADAM JOHNSON was born in 1965, in Stalybridge, Cheshire. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked for the BBC, a theatre-booking agency and a reference-book publisher. He self-published a small collection of poems, In the Garden, in 1986; later work appeared in magazines, anthologies, and three collections - Poems (Hearing Eye, 1992), The Spiral Staircase (Acumen, 1993) and The Playground Bell (Carcanet, 1994).