He is a trustee of the national charity Survivors’ Poetry, campaigning alongside people from the mental health system survivor movement in a variety of paid and voluntary roles, both locally and nationally. Recent study includes an MRes in Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, concentrating on mental health and civil rights arenas.

His poetry, short fiction, book reviews and associated articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, in the UK and abroad, and is proud to say he has been termed a ‘small-press poet’ by some from their headier realms.

Philip Ruthen currently lives in south London.

In these strongly delineated poems, Philip Ruthen takes us from the Peppermint Lounge in Cardiff to Southbank’s Festival Hall -- and from Spain and Denmark to France -- by train and by tube, and through the meanderings of the poetic imagination. There are distances and separations to be bridged, he tells us, and new citizenships to be won. Through these strong poetic musings he teaches himself, and us, into a shared citizenship of the heart.
George Wallace - editor, www.poetrybay.com

There’s a tremendous energy and electricity of feeling in Philip Ruthen’s highly sensuous poetry; it all works very powerfully together. Compassionate and fiercely felt, ‘Jetty View Holding’ reveals Ruthen as a psycho-geographer for our times, acutely alert to the way place and the human spirit lock down together and to the extraordinary power that our natural, urban and social worlds exert upon the individual psyche. A singular and edgy first collection.
Jane Draycott

To read extracts please click here