Bill was born in Middlesex in 1948. Not a bad time, he considers, for if the 1950s were a bit static, the 1960s brought an outburst in popular culture: music, football, bikes, pop festivals, that made it an exciting time to be growing up. By 1971, his first poems were published in Poetry Review under the editorship of Eric Mottram (later to become Professor of English and American Literature at King's College London). Mottram and Bob Cobbing, the little press professor, and publisher of vast numbers of new titles for new writers, as Writers Forum, were the two immediate influences on Bill in the 1970s, but American poets like Michael McClure and Muriel Rukeyser, realisers of word-potential like Keats, Crabbe and Hopkins, and the literature of Old English have also long claimed his admiration. By the end of the 1970s, innovative little presses and many of the most productive poets of the period had been dislodged and cut off from patronage by an aggressively traditionalist Literature Panel at the Arts Council. Subsidies for readings foundered, and what is often viewed as a 'renaissance' in English poetry was left to dwindle and carry on its work - if anyone could be bothered - for nothing.
In the second half of Bill's life, he made a new start studying Old English at King's College, London, obtaining a PhD in 1987. This led to a fruitful co-operation with Anglo-Saxon Books in Norfolk, and many new titles, including an edition of The Battle of Maldon and a book on the complexities of Anglo-Saxon Magic. In 1990, Bill moved north and settled at Seaham on the Durham coast, where he has produced titles on local history, dialect and place-names. Throughout these years he was also writing poetry, and the latest titles have come not from his own Amra Imprint but as paperback volumes from other little presses: Rousseau and the Wicked (Invisible Books, London, 1996), a joint book with Tom Raworth and Tom Leonard (Etruscan Reader 5, Etruscan Books, Buckfastleigh, 1997) and on his own, Nomad Sense (Talus Editions, London, 1998), A Book of Spilt Cities (Etruscan Books, 1999), Ushabtis (Talus, 2001), and Durham and other sequences (West House Books, 2002).
After finishing work on cataloguing the Mottram Archive bequeathed to King's College London, Bill returned to Seaham in 1999, where the University of Northumbria's reprint of his Dialect Word List produced unexpected media approval (no, 'approval' is too strong a word... 'mildly amused patronising flickers of attention' would be more accurate...). This has led to a Heritage Lottery Fund supported project 'Wor Language', investigating the relationship between dialect, technology and society in the North-East.