Who is J.L. Dent

John grew up in a working-class terraced house in Leeds, West Yorkshire. As a kid, he often sat around bonfires with his friends, smoking cigarettes, desperate to be seen as cool. He intensely disliked school, leaving as soon as possible. At seventeen he moved to London where he squatted. He read his first book, around this time, Catcher in the Rye, and fell in love with reading.

The anarcho-boho-punk squat scene was a melting pot for utopian ideology on changing yourself and the world. Now many decades later, the counterculture is still a big part of his life, loving free-movement dance, Buddhist philosophy, meditation, astrology, socialism, tantra, feminism, eco-politics, etc, inspiring him to write. John writes about what he knows, lives and feels passionate about. However, though his writing includes New Age spirituality, it is devoid of saccharine reverence, recognising how the personal growth world can take itself a bit too seriously, becoming pious and thus in need of some healthy desanctifying.

His debut novel, How to Have a SHIT Relationship is a work of fiction yet like many novels, it includes elements based on the author’s life, such as living in a caravan hidden away in woodland, this is something John did for eight years. The aim of his writing is to encourage the reader to recognise we are all more alike than different, and that even the characters we don’t warm to, may represent some of our self-parts that hide in the shadows. As well as an author, John is also a psychotherapist.

Some of the books John has loved reading over the last year are Shuggle Bain by Douglas Stuart, Putney by Sofka Zinovieff, The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abe Dare, Apples Never Fall by Ilane Moriarty, Lost Connections by Johanne Hari and The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry.

John lives in Stroud with his teenage son.