Vernon Watkins (1906 – 1967) was a Welsh poet, and a painter. He was born in Maesteg in Glamorgan, and brought up mainly in Swansea.

He was educated at Repton School, and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was reading modern languages at Cambridge: but left before completing his degree, the start of a very troubled period in his life at the end of the 1920s. He wanted to travel abroad, but family pressure made him take a bank job in Cardiff; it ended in a breakdown that marked him permanently. He would remain in a Swansea branch of Lloyds Bank, with little responsibility, for much of his life. His ambitions were for his poetry; in critical terms they were not to be fulfilled. On the other hand, he became a major figure for the Anglo-Welsh poetry tradition, and his poems were included in major anthologies.

He met Dylan Thomas, who was to be a close friend, in 1935 when Watkins had returned to a job in a bank in Swansea. Letters to Vernon Watkins by Thomas was published in 1957. The 1983 book Portrait of a Friend by Watkins' wife Gwen (nee Davies) deals with the relationship. This was despite Thomas's failure, in the capacity of best man, to turn up to their wedding in 1944. Others in the Swansea group known as the 'Kardomah boys' were the composer Daniel Jenkyn Jones and the artists Fred Janes and Ceri Richards.

Watkins had met Gwen at Bletchley Park, where he worked during World War II as part of the cryptographic team. During the war he was for a time associated with the New Apocalyptics group. With his first book Ballad of the Mari Llwyd (1941) accepted by Faber and Faber, he had a publisher with a policy of sticking by their authors. In his case this may be considered to have had an adverse long-term effect on his reputation, in that it is generally thought that he over-published.