Life and Work
Jeff Nuttall was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, and grew up in Herefordshire. He studied painting in the years after the Second World War and began publishing poetry in the early 1960s. Together with Bob Cobbing, he founded the influential Writers Forum Press and writers workshop.
He also associated with many of the American beat generation writers, especially William Burroughs. Nuttall's self-published "My Own Mag" mimeographed newsletter provided Burroughs with an important outlet for his experimental literature in the early 1960s.
In 1966 he was one of the founders of the People Show, an early and long-lasting performance art group and was involved in the founding of the UK underground newspaper International Times. In 1967 two of his illustrations appeared in the counter-cultural tabloid newspaper The Last Times (Volume 1, number 1, Fall 1967) published by Charles Plymell.
His book Bomb Culture (1968) was one of the key texts of the countercultural revolution of the time, a work which drew links between the emergence of alternatives to mainstream societal norms and the threatening backdrop of potential nuclear annihilation. Nuttall was one of the pioneers of the happening in Britain.
Nuttall served as Chairman of the National Poetry Society from 1975 to 1976, a period when the Society briefly served as a home for the British Poetry Revival. He was poetry critic for several national newspapers and was the Poetry Society nominee for Poet Laureate but was overlooked in favour of Ted Hughes.
Nuttall worked as an art teacher; senior lecturer at Leeds Polytechnic and was head of fine art at Liverpool Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University). As an actor he appeared in over 40 feature films and television programmes. His Selected Poems was published by Salt Publishing in 2003.
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