East Anglian Writers

Poetry

• Fantasy Poets no 17, 1953.

• Home Truths, 1957.

• The Owl in the Tree, 1965.

• The Stones of Emptiness, 1967.

• Penguin Modern Poets 18, 1970.

• Inscriptions, 1973.

• New Confessions, 1974.

• A Portion of Foxes, 1977.

• Victorian Voices, 1980.

• Poems 1953-1983, 1984.

• Letter from Tokyo, 1987.

• Poems 1953-1988, 1989.
• The Dust of the World, 1994.
• Selected Poems 1956-1996, 1997.
• A Different Country, 2000.
• A Move in the Weather, 2003.
• Collected Poems, 2007.
• Black Saxon (Mills & Boons Masquerade, 1982)

Criticism:

• Contemporary English Poetry, 1959.

• Poetry Today , 1973. Revised and updated 1984, 1996.

• Twentieth century English Poetry, 1978.

• ix Centuries of Verse, 1984.

• Odyssey: Mirror of the Mediterranean,(with Roloff Beny), 1981.

• Six Centuries of Verse.

For Children:

• Beyond the Inhabited World: Roman Britain, 1976.

Travel and Topography:

• Japan (with Roloff Beny), 1968.

• The Deserts of the Hesperides: an Experience of Libya, 1969.

• In Italy (with Roloff Beny and Peter Porter), 1974.

• Odyssey: Mirror of the Mediterranean,(with Roloff Beny), 1981.

Edited:

• Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (with GeoffreyBownes) 1964. Revised 1998 and 2008.

• The English Poets (with Peter Porter), 1974.

• New Poetry 4 (with Fleur Adcock), 1978.

• Larkin at Sixty, 1982.

• Poetry 1946-1980 (with John Mole) 1983.

• Philip Larkin, Collecetd Poems, 1989

• Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1992.

• Longfellow, Selected Poems, 1993 and 1996.

• R.S. Thomas, Selected Poems, 1996.

• Philip Larkin, Further Requirements, 2001.

• George MacBeth, Selected Poems, 2002.

• The Ruins of Time: Antiquarian and Archaeological Poems, 2006.

• John Skelton: Poet-to-Poet, 2008.

Biography:

Poet Anthony Thwaite has been at the centre of English literary life for over fifty years. He was born in 1930, spent his early childhood in Yorkshire, was a wartime evacuee to the USA (1940-44), and returned to complete his education in Somerset , before doing his two-year compulsory military service, mainly in Libya. He then took up his scholarship in English at Christ Church, Oxford, where he edited Isis. Graduating and marrying in 1955, he and his wife Ann Thwaite then went to Japan, where he was visiting lecturer in English Literature in Tokyo University for two years.

Returning to England in 1957, he was then in turn a producer for BBC radio, literary editor of The Listener, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Libya, Henfield Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, literary editor of the New Statesman, and co-editor of Encounter from 1973 to 1985. In 1986 he was Chairman of the Judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Together with Andrew Motion, Anthony Thwaite is literary executor of the estate of Philip Larkin and he has edited Larkin’s Collected Poems (1988), Selected Letters (1992) and Further Requirements.

Anthony Thwaite is a former director of the London publishers André Deutsch and was Poet in Residence at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, in 1992. he holds honorary doctorates from the University of Hull(1989) and the University of East Anglia (2007). He was give a Cholmondeley Poetry Award (1983), and was awarded the OBE in 1990. He was a Japan Foundation Fellow in Japan in 1985-6.

His poetry collections began with a Fantasy Press pamphlet in 1953, and culminate with his seventeenth collection, Collected Poems, in 2007. Among his other books are Six Centuries of Verse (1984), based on a major 16-part series he wrote for television, presented by John Gielgud. He co-edited the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1964; revised 1998; new edition due late 2008). An interest in archaeology has influenced much of his work: he curated an exhibition at The Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, entitled A Poet’s Pots, in 1998, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2000. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1978.

Anthony Thwaite lives in Norfolk with his wife Ann Thwaite, the biographer and children’s book writer. They have four daughters and ten grandchildren.