John Ash (writer)

In a review of To The City, Poetry Magazine said that John Ash "could be the best English poet of his generation". In 2007 he was profiled in The Economist in an article by Hugh Pope, himself an author and formerly the Wall Street Journal correspondent in Istanbul. Pope suggested that Ash was the leading light in a new "Istanbul School" of English-speaking poets taking their inspiration from the city.

Following Byzantine Journey, and other travel writing, Ash led tours of the relevant sites and in 2006 wrote the script for the documentary "Istanbul for Aficionados". He also appeared in a BBC guide to Istanbul, broadcast in 2005 on BBC Four's "Mediterranean Tales" strand.

Moving to New York City in 1985, Ash became associated with the New York School of poets and formed a strong and lasting friendship with its leading proponent, John Ashbery. After stints teaching at the University of Iowa and the University of California, Berkeley, he moved to Istanbul in 1996, where he has lived since, first teaching at Boğaziçi University, before moving to Kadir Has University.

John Ash (29 June 1948 – 3 December 2019) was an expatriate British poet and writer.

John Ash was born in Manchester, England in 1948, the son of schoolteachers. With a brief break to attend the University of Birmingham (B.A. 1969) and to take a post-graduation year in Cyprus, he remained in the city of his birth until 1985. In the notes to his first book, a sequence titled Casino, Ash remarked that it had grown "out of several years of research for another project – a prose work which was to have been called "The Mauve Book: In Praise of Decadence". He also noted that titles of some sections and the over-all structure had a musical analogy. Musical references continued in the books he published while still in England.