Peter Thabit Jones has authored eighteen books, including the Dylan Thomas Walking Tour of Greenwich Village, New York with Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter. He and Aeronwy Thomas did a poetry reading tour across America in 2008, organised by Stanley H. Barkan, their American publisher. Peter has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, UK), The Royal Literary Fund Award (UK), an Arts Council of Wales Award, the 2016 Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry (UK), and the 2017 Homer: European Medal for Art and Poetry. His poem "Kilvey Hill" is incorporated into a stained-glass window in Saint Thomas School, Swansea.
Three of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for renowned Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, the Theatre National Du Luxembourg, and the Sofia Opera and Ballet in Bulgaria.
In April 2014, he was inducted into the Phi Sigma Iota Society at Salem State University, Massachusetts, USA, for his contribution to literature and literary translations. He gave the Guest of Honour speech before his induction.
He tutored English Literature and Creative Writing on the part-time degree programme at Swansea University’s Adult Education Department for twenty-two years, retiring in 2014.
Further information can be found on his website here.
Front cover drawing of John Lennon by Peter Thabit Jones ©2026
About The Boy Who Drew John Lennon, by Peter Thabit Jones
The poems range from the poet’s childhood in the shadow of Kilvey Hill in Eastside Swansea, where he was raised by his Welsh grandparents, to his times (2010 to 2025) spent as an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. Other subjects include poems about poets, such as Elizabeth Daryush, Ivor Gurney, Federico Garcia Lorca, R. S. Thomas, and Welsh language poet Alan Llwyd, artist Stanley Spencer, the jazz and swing music singer Billie Holiday, Elvis, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, war, a refugee mother, a victim of domestic abuse, homelessness, widowed women, and the 1926 General Strike in Wales.
You can read more about The Boy Who Drew John Lennon here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection.
From The Boy Who Drew John Lennon
Lassen Volanic Park, California
(for Patricia and Bill)
We followed the rough path,
Below the mountains
Stretching to a visual heaven
And the wide splinter of a lake
Of greyed placid blue.
We talked as we walked
Above the deep valley of nature,
Like two people who have awoken
In another planet’s landscape:
A landscape that was shaped
Through a time before mankind’s
Strict calendars and clocks.
A time when volcanoes raged
With eruptions and the land
Slid and moved, broke apart,
Catapulting boulders
In the rising collapse,
Until the agitated storm
Noise of it all settled
Down to a stilled calmness,
Like the silence sleeping
On the glassy face of a pond.
We strolled down to where
The geysers were smoking
From a dulled snow surface
And the strong sniff of sulphur
Fouled the afternoon’s air.
Tourists, we took our photos
To solidify our memories.
Then breathless with hiking
And our excited achievement,
We climbed back to the parked car.
Below, the warm day spread out,
The landscape the physical evidence
Of this planet’s ever-changing
Body, its chaos and its creation—
The natural engines of its internal magic.
In the Poetry Class
He left you, you said,
In the country of tears.
He left you broken,
Your beaten mind
A junkyard full
Of his angry menace.
I am your teacher
And you told me
Last week, when my other
Students had left.
I glance at you,
Your young hand hovering
Over the blank sheet
Of writing paper.
Do your eyes now sadden
Because of the ugly bruise
Of your memories,
The Jekyll and Hyde
Of his so-called love?
I watch as you
Start to scribble
Down your gathering thoughts,
The nervous rivers
Of blue words claiming
The clean land of the page,
As I hope one day
You fully claim back your life
From the prison of pain,
Claim back the true you
That his shadows still occupy,
So that you find the calm
Rhythm of real caring
And a happiness unchained
In the whole of your being.
