Alan Charles Brownjohn (born 28 July 1931) is an English

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems ( oral or wri ...

and

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others asp ...

. He has also worked as a teacher, lecturer, critic and broadcaster.

Life and work

Alan Brownjohn was born in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

and educated at Merton College, Oxford. He taught in schools between 1957 and 1965. In 1960 he married the writer Shirley Toulson and in 1962 both were elected as Labour councillors in the Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council, and Brownjohn stood as the Labour Party candidate for Richmond (Surrey) in the 1964 general election, polling in second place. He and Touslon divorced in 1969. Brownjohn lectured at Battersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until 1979, when he became a full-time writer. He participated in

Philip Hobsbaum Philip Dennis Hobsbaum (29 June 1932 – 28 June 2005) was a British teacher, poet and critic. Life Hobsbaum was born into a Polish Jewish family in London, and brought up in Bradford, Yorkshire, where he attended Belle Vue Boys' Grammar Sc ...

's weekly poetry discussion meetings known as The Group, which also included Peter Porter,

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and

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. Brownjohn is a Patron of Humanists UK. Reviewing Brownjohn's ''Collected Poems'' ( Enitharmon Press, 2006), Anthony Thwaite wrote in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'': "...he is a social poet in the sense that if people in the future want to know what many lives were like in the second half of the 20th century, they should read Alan Brownjohn - observant, troubled, humane, scrupulous, wry, funny."Anthony Thwaite,
"The vodka in the verse"
''The Guardian'', 7 October 2006.

Bibliography

*''Travelers Alone'' (1954), poems *''The Railings'' (1961), poems *''To Clear the River'' (1964), novel, as John Berrington *''Penguin Modern Poets 14'' (1965), with

Michael Hamburger Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger (22 March 1924 – 7 June 2007) was a noted German-British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic. He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and ...

Charles Tomlinson Alfred Charles Tomlinson, CBE (8 January 1927 – 22 August 2015) was an English poet, translator, academic, and illustrator. He was born in Penkhull, and grew up in Basford, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Life After attending Longton High Sc ...

*''The Lions' Mouths'' (1967) *''A Day by Indirections'' (1969), broadsheet poem *''First I Say This: A Selection of Poems for Reading Aloud'' (1969), editor *''Sandgrains On A Tray'' (1969) *''Woman Reading Aloud'' (1969) broadsheet poem *''Synopsis'' (1970) *''Brownjohn's Beasts'' (1970) *''Transformation Scene'' (1971) broadside poem *''An Equivalent'' (1971) poem *''New Poems 1970-71. A P.E.N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry'' (1971), edited with

Seamus Heaney Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

and Jon Stallworthy *''Warrior's Career'' (1972) *''She Made of It'' (1974) *''A Song of Good Life'' (1975) *''Philip Larkin'' (1975) *''New Poetry 3, Arts Council anthology'' (1977), edited with Maureen Duffy *''A Night in the Gazebo'' (1980) *''Nineteen Poems'' (1980) *''Collected Poems'' 1952–1983 (1983) *''The Old Flea-Pit'' (1987) *''The Observation Car'' (1990), poems *''The Gregory Anthology 1987–1990'' (1990), editor with K. W. Gransden *''The Way You Tell Them: A Yarn of the Nineties'' (1990), novel *''Inertia Reel'' (1992), broadside poem *''In the Cruel Arcade'' (1994) *''The Long Shadows'' (1997), novel *''Horace by Pierre Corneille'' (1997), translator *''The Cat without E-mail'' ( Enitharmon Press 2001) *''A Funny Old Year'' (2001), novel *''The Men Around Her Bed'' (Enitharmon Press, 2004) *''Windows on the Moon'' (2009), novel *''Ludbrooke and Others'' (Enitharmon Press, 2010) *''A Bottle and Other Poems'' (Enitharmon Press, 2015) *''parrot'' poem

Life and work

Bibliography

References

External links