Peter Finch

Finch was born in Cardiff, Wales, in March 1947, son of Stanley and Marjorie Finch, a post-office worker and a telephonist. He attended school in the city and took up his first job as a trainee local government accountant at Glamorgan County Council in 1963.

He began reading and writing poetry after hearing a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl and then buying a copy of the City Lights edition of this work at Cardiff's SPCK (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge) Bookshop in the Friary. Finch's early work appeared in small magazines such as Poet's Platform, Breakthru and Viewpoints. In 1964, he heard Howlin' Wolf and other performers at the American Negro Blues Festival at Colston Hall, Bristol. There, he met the bass player and performer Willie Dixon and tried to interest him in his home-grown south Wales blues lyrics. He failed.

Later life and work

In the new millennium, Finch worked on psychogeographies and alternative guides to his native city of Cardiff. His first book of this genre, Real Cardiff, which appeared in 2002, was successful enough to generate three follow-ups and a whole series of Real books covering mainly urban areas throughout the UK. These are written by a range of authors (including Grahame Davies and Patrick McGuinness). There are 25 in the series to date. Finch acts as series editor. Finch has also written on popular music (The Roots of Rock – 2016), the Severn Estuary (Edging the Estuary – 2013) and has produced innovative walking guides to both Cardiff and its valleys with the photographer John Briggs.

In 2022, with the assistance of editor Andrew Taylor, Finch published two volumes comprising 1,000 pages of his Collected Poems. These books have been well received. He has recently published a new chapbook of 14 poems, Just When You Think It's Over – It Starts Again, with the small DIY, punk, handmade publisher in New Jersey, Between Shadows Press. In early 2025 Seren brought out There's Everything To Play For - The Poetry of Peter Finch, a critical overview of Finch's work from Andrew Taylor.

In 2025 he published The Literary Business, a personal ramble around the book world. Over the past 60 years Finch had seen the business from all sides. This is his report on what he found.

In 2026 in the series Among The Neighbors the State University of New York at Buffalo published a monograph on the magazine Second Aeon written by Finch. This volume contains a detailed consideration on the success of the magazine along with a comprehensive bibliographical list of all issues and all attendant publications.