H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
To begin writing, we need to feel free: free of the pressure to conform to expectations, free of the inner critic that wants to censor what we write, free of worrying about whether the writing will be good enough. Before H.D. started work on a poem, she would deliberately splash ink all over her clothes. […]
G.V. Desani
If I’d lived through the 1940s, say a bit after that hideous war against fascism, then the Fellow I’d have asked on to the podium of RSL stage would have been G.V. Desani. Which is to say, Govindas Vishnoodas Desani, a joyous mouthful of mighty India. I say India but Mr G.V. Desani was born […]
J.L. Carr
Joseph Lloyd Carr (1912-1994), better known as Jim, disliked London, the establishment, publishers, the media and the business world. If he’d been offered a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, he might well not have wanted to join. But it would have been very good for the RSL if he had. Carr was a remarkable individual and a […]
Martin Bell
Martin Bell was a paradox. Most poets publish several books before being granted the honour of a volume of Collected Poems, Bell did not. His Collected Poems of 1967, was the first and also last book of his lifetime, though Bloodaxe published his Complete Poems (including unpublished later poems), in 1988 ten years after his death […]
Parv Bancil
Dear Parv, It’s too late to tell you what your work meant to me. I could have told you in person, but the two times we were in the same room and introduced, I was shy and you were with old friends, and I felt that rather than have your ear chewed off by a […]
W.H. Auden
Anyone who has tried to write a poem has wondered, long before the words settle into lines, at the compulsion itself, the sense of urgent waiting in the room, and no one has described the feeling as beautifully as W.H. Auden. It was his life-long subject, in fact: how to respond to an encounter with […]
Gertrude Bell
It’s difficult not to think that, had she lived in a different age, the writer, explorer, archaeologist, civil servant, kingmaker and co-founder of the Iraqi state Gertrude Bell would have stormed into the Royal Society of Literature and become one of its leading lights and Fellows. With a bit of luck she might have been elected […]
Charlotte Brontë
When Charlotte Brontë was 18, she sent a poem to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey and asked what he thought of her writing. This was the 19th-century version of sending a song you had recorded on your phone to Stormzy and asking for feedback. Now, Stormzy is a generous musician and might even respond to […]
Andrea Dunbar
“Andrea is not God. She must come to terms with this.” Or at least this is what her Religious Studies teacher put on Andrea Dunbar’s school report. That same school report shows her failing in most subjects except English, where she got an A. She might not have been God but there was something miraculous about […]
George Eliot
George Eliot was never elected a Fellow of the RSL. When I first became aware of this, I couldn’t quite believe it. Silly men, I thought. They weren’t able to read past their beards or past the scandal of her transgressive living arrangements with the married writer-philosopher George Henry Lewes. Yet how could they have […]
Ian Fleming
Readers remember characters. They know Falstaff, Fagin, Sherlock Holmes and Jeeves, even if they cannot name a book or play in which the character appeared. No one remembers my plots, but they name their daughters after Aliena and tell me how much they hate William Hamleigh. James Bond must be the best known fictional character […]
Constance Garnett
When I was allowed to leave the children’s library and join the grown-ups library next door, it was like being let loose in a giant sweetshop, and, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, I felt drawn to a hexagonal bookshelf at the far end of the library. It was full of books with red […]