Malcolm Bradbury

Last updated

Sir

Malcolm Bradbury

CBE
Malcolm-bradbury.jpg
Born
Malcolm Stanley Bradbury

(1932-09-07)7 September 1932
Died27 November 2000(2000-11-27) (aged 68)
Norwich, Norfolk, England
Alma mater University of Leicester (BA)
Queen Mary College, University of London (MA)
Victoria University of Manchester (PhD)
Years active1955–2000
SpouseElizabeth Salt
Children2
Website www.malcolmbradbury.com

Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury, CBE (7 September 1932 – 27 November 2000) was an English author and academic. [1]

Contents

Life

Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of a railwayman. [2] His family moved to London in 1935, but returned to Sheffield in 1941 with his brother and mother. The family later moved to Nottingham and in 1943 Bradbury attended West Bridgford Grammar School, where he remained until 1950. He read English at University College, Leicester, gaining a first-class degree in 1953. He continued his studies at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he gained his MA in 1955. [3]

Between 1955 and 1958, Bradbury moved between teaching posts with the University of Manchester and Indiana University in the United States. He returned to England in 1958 for a major heart operation; such was his heart condition that he was not expected to live beyond middle age. In 1959, while in hospital, he completed his first novel, Eating People is Wrong .

Malcolm Bradbury's grave at St Mary's Church, Tasburgh, Norfolk Bradburygrave.jpg
Malcolm Bradbury's grave at St Mary's Church, Tasburgh, Norfolk

Bradbury married Elizabeth Salt and they had two sons. He took up his first teaching post as an adult-education tutor at the University of Hull. With his study on Evelyn Waugh in 1962 he began his career of writing and editing critical books. From 1961 to 1965 he taught at the University of Birmingham. He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the MA in Creative Writing course, attended by both Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. [4]

He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983 and Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987. He retired from academic life in 1995.

Bradbury became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1991 for services to literature and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to literature. [5]

Bradbury died at Priscilla Bacon Lodge, Colman Hospital, Norwich, on 27 November 2000, attended by his wife and their two sons, Matthew and Dominic. He was buried on 4 December 2000 in the churchyard of St Mary's parish church, Tasburgh, near Norwich where the Bradburys owned a second home. Though he was not an orthodox religious believer, he respected the traditions and socio-cultural role of the Church of England and enjoyed visiting churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin's poem, "Church Going".[ citation needed ]

Works

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American. However, he is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although often compared with his contemporary David Lodge, a friend who has also written campus novels, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. In 1986, he wrote a short humorous book titled Why Come to Slaka?, a parody of travel books, dealing with Slaka, the fictional Eastern European country that is the setting for his novel Rates of Exchange, a 1983 novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. [6]

Bradbury also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy , The Gravy Train (and its sequel, The Gravy Train Goes East, which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue , Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends, Kingsley Amis's The Green Man , and the penultimate Inspector Morse episode The Wench is Dead . His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced by Andy Rowley. The episode "Foreign Bodies" was screened on BBC One on 15 July 2000. [7]

His work was often humorous and ironic, mocking academe, British culture, and communism, usually with a picaresque tone. [8]

Selected bibliography

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evelyn Waugh</span> British writer and journalist (1903–1966)

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of East Anglia</span> Public university in Norwich, England

The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a 320-acre (130-hectare) campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and twenty-six schools of study. It is one of five BBSRC funded research campuses with thirty businesses, four independent research institutes and a teaching hospital on site.

David John Lodge CBE is an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge has also written television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T. S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as Point of View, The Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue, beginning with Beginning and ending with Ending.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Motion</span> English poet and writer (born 1952)

Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.

Reginald Charles Hill FRSL was an English crime writer and the winner in 1995 of the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 1978.

<i>Scoop</i> (novel) 1938 novel by Evelyn Waugh

Scoop is a 1938 novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. It is a satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tsitsi Dangarembga</span> Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.

Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though it falls under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage—screenwriting and playwriting—are often taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tracy Chevalier</span> American-British novelist

Tracy Rose Chevalier is an American-British novelist. She is best known for her second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was adapted as a 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth.

The University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course was founded by Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Sir Angus Wilson in 1970. The M.A. has been regarded among the most prestigious in the United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Raban</span> British travel writer, critic, and novelist (1942–2023)

Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban was a British award-winning travel writer, playwright, critic, and novelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Warren Clarke</span> British actor (1947–2014)

Warren Clarke was an English actor. He appeared in many films after a significant role as Dim in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. His television appearances included Dalziel and Pascoe, The Manageress and Sleepers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Bigsby</span> British literary analyst and novelist

Christopher William Edgar BigsbyFRSA FRSL, is a British literary analyst and novelist, with more than sixty books to his credit. Earlier in his writing career, his books were published under the name C. W. E. Bigsby. He has won awards for his work on the American theatre, for his biography of Arthur Miller, for his first novel, Hester, and for his work in study abroad. He holds honorary degrees from Bolton University and the Complutense University of Madrid.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glenn Patterson</span> Writer from Northern Ireland

Glenn Patterson FRSL is a writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland, best known as a novelist. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Matt Whyman is a British novelist, also known for his work as an advice columnist for numerous teenage magazines.

Andy Rowley is a British television producer known for his children's dramas, including Jeopardy, which won a BAFTA Award for best children's drama in 2002, and Microsoap, Prix Jeunesse winner and BAFTA best children's drama award winner in 1999. Rowley was a BBC Production Manager who went on to produce the last TV script written by Malcolm Bradbury, "Foreign Bodies" for Dalziel and Pascoe and many memorable TV dramas including Loved Up, Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, Uncle Max, I Was a Rat, and Scene, as well being a UK producer on the French feature film L'Isle Aux Tresors.

Fadia Faqir is a Jordanian British author and academician, involved in human rights issues. She was born in Amman, Jordan, and her father is from Jordan, of the tribe Al-Ajarmah. But her mother is Circassian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Cowan (writer)</span> English novelist

Andrew Cowan is an English novelist and nonfiction author, who directed the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia in 2008–18. His six novels include Pig (1994).

Slaka is the imaginary East European COMECON country featured in two books of the English novelist Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000).

References

  1. "Literary Encyclopedia – Sir Malcolm Bradbury". Litencyc.com. Retrieved 28 December 2014.
  2. "BBC News – ENTERTAINMENT – Sir Malcolm Bradbury: Literature Man". News.bbc.co.uk. 28 November 2000. Retrieved 28 December 2014.
  3. Harvey-Wood, Harriet (28 November 2000). "Obituary: Sir Malcolm Bradbury". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
  4. "Author Sir Malcolm Bradbury dies". News.bbc.co.uk. 28 November 2000. Retrieved 28 December 2014.
  5. Official announcement knighthood. The London Gazette , 30 December 1999.
  6. "Malcolm Bradbury". Picador.com. Retrieved 28 December 2014.
  7. ""Dalziel and Pascoe" Foreign Bodies (TV Episode 2000)". IMDb. 25 October 2013. Retrieved 28 December 2014.
  8. "Malcolm Bradbury". Lidiavianu.scriptmania.com. Retrieved 28 December 2014.