Peter Armstrong was born in Blaydon on Tyne in 1957, and grew up there with both the blessings (the music of liturgical language; the sense of a world infused with mystery) and the curses (the pathological sense of guilt) associated with a Roman Catholic childhood. He went on to read Philosophy and English at Sunderland, where he underwent a Protestant Evangelical conversion, before finding some kind of uneasy middle ground in an Anglicanism closer, he hopes, to that of George Herbert than that of the General Synod. He now describes himself as an anglo-catholic agnostic, but insists that agnosticism is central to Christian Orthodoxy. It was during his time at Sunderland that he began to write seriously, benefiting in particular from the influence of poets Richard Kell and Roger Garfitt. His first published poems (in Poetry Review) belong to this time, and he went on to contribute a selection of early work to Ten North Eastern Poets (Bloodaxe). He was awarded an Eric Gregory prize in 1984.

After training as a teacher, and quickly realising that he was not cut out to survive the rigours of secondary school life, he trained as a psychiatric nurse at St Nicholas Hospital in Newcastle. A first collection (Risings) was initially to be published by Taxus, but when that press lost funding, was brought out by Enitharmon in 1988. Never the speediest writer in the world, and perhaps slowed further by the competing demands of life in the NHS, his next collection (The Red Funnelled Boat, Picador) appeared in 1998. That his current collection, The Capital of Nowhere (Picador), is appearing as early as 2003 represents an unprecedented acceleration by the standards of his usual gastropod-like speed of composition.

His work has long been characterised by joint preoccupations with religion and the landscape, frequently fused in the austere, perhaps ascetic lines of the hinterland of the north, but also finding locations in the Hebrides and a notional America (more closely related to road movies and the more lyrical cigarette advertisers' work than any pretended knowledge of the actual place). Over the past decade, in clear reflection of his work as a cognitive therapist and trainer, an increasingly overt psychological theme has become prominent.

He now lives in Tynedale, allowing as it does, ready access not only to Nowhere's capital, but to its remoter reaches, and works in the Newcastle Cognitive & Behavioural Therapies Centre. He is a member of the Northern Poets' workshop, along with Sean O'Brien, WN Herbert, Joan Hewitt, Joan Johnstone, and Michael McCarthy.