Born in London of Scottish descent, Adrian Mitchell, poet, playwright, novelist, editor and journalist was one of the pioneers of the sixties Underground Poetry; a freewheeling, surrealist form of performance poetry, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, that Mitchell and his like-minded contemporaries utilised to rail against the political and social injustices of the life in the nuclear age.

Although Mitchell himself cites the visionary poems of William Blake as his most important influence (he wrote a play about the poet's life), much in his verse recalls Auden's committed poems of the 1930s. The style is direct, suffused with energy, sometimes very funny, accessible and deceptively simplistic. Arguably Mitchell's poems are often most effective in performance - as the thousands of successful readings he has given over the years attest.

Among his best-known collections are For Beauty Douglas: Collected Poems 1953-1979 (1982), Love Songs of World War Three (1989) and Heart on the Left: Poems 1953-1984 (1997). For children he has written All My Own Stuff (1991) and The Thirteen Secrets of Poetry (1993). Liverpool poet Brian Patten said of Mitchell: 'He has had a great influence on the early work of both me and my contemporaries. We are proud to acknowledge our indebtedness and we are glad to have received such a present.'