Elected: 1997
Year of birth: 1944
He lectured in Canada, before working as Education Officer at the Poetry Society in London (1970-75) and was Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University (1977-9). He was awarded an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1985.
His books of poetry include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and Short Afternoons (1989), which won the Hawthornden Prize and was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (2000).
Recent books of poetry include The Magic Box: Poems for Children (2009) and Ode to Didcot Power Station (2014).
Fellows are nominated by peers and elected by our Council of writers – our governing Board. Being elected a Fellow of the RSL is a lifetime honour. This role gives them the opportunity to support other writers, readers and the future of literature. The RSL connects writers in the Fellowship to one another, and to a wider readership.
