John Scott grew up in Melbourne and attended Monash University where he was a contemporary of fellow poets Alan Wearne and Laurie Duggan (qq.v.). In the 1960s he was an active participant in the poetry scene at Monash, winning the University's Writing Awards in 1966 and 1967. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Diploma of Education at that institution.
Scott worked as a freelance scriptwriter for radio and television shows Auntie Jack Show (1974), It's Magic (1974) and the Gary MacDonald Show (1977) before taking a position lecturing in media at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (later the University of Canberra). He has been a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. Scott's works have been nominated for, and received, numerous awards. He was a member of the Four Australian Poets reading group that toured the USA and Canada in 1985 and has been a guest at Adelaide Writers' Week, the Melbourne Spoleto Festival and the Canberra Word Festival. In 1990, John Scott was awarded a poetry scholarship by the Australia Council to the Nancy Keesing Studio, Paris, at the Cite Internationale des Artes. It was here that he completed the two prose poems Elegy and The Apology and began work on his novella What I Have Written (1993). Although Scott's first novel Blair was published in 1988, he was still essentially writing as a poet and it was the enthusiasm of Mark Henshaw (who was also working at the Paris Studio) for the novel as a form that influenced the direction of Scott's writing.
Scott edited and translated Emmanuel Hocquard : Elegies and Other Works (1989).
