Photo shows Barry MacSweeney (left) with Stuart Montgomery, publisher of Fulcrum Press, in the pub after a reading at Modern Tower in Newcastle. Cropped from this version of the photo, to Montgomery's left, were Basil Bunting and Tony Harrison.

Barry MacSweeney was born in in Newcastle. After leaving school at , he worked as a journalist, mainly in Newcastle, Kent, Bradford and South Shields. He published numerous collections, including an early Selected Poems in The Tempers of Hazard , published by Paladin in 1993, and destroyed the same year. The Book of Demons (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and found him a much larger audience. He died in 2000. Two previous posthumous books have appeared: Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems, 1965–2000 (Bloodaxe, 2003), and Horses in Boiling Blood (Equipage, 2004).