Peter Parker | |
|---|---|
 Parker in 2019 | |
| Born | Peter Robert Nevill Parker 2 June 1954 Herefordshire, England |
| Occupation |
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| Education | English Literature, University College, London |
| Period | 1980–present |
| Genre | Biography, history, gardening, architecture, non-fiction |
| Website | |
| www | |
Peter Parker (born 2 June 1954) is a British biographer, historian, journalist and editor. [1] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997. [2]
Parker was born to Edward Parker and Patricia Sturridge [3] on 2 June 1954 in Herefordshire in the West Midlands of England. He attended the Downs Malvern in Colwall and Canford School in Dorset, and read English literature at University College London. He began a career in literary journalism while working in the Design Centre's bookshop in the 1980s, contributing regular book reviews to Gay News and London Magazine. He published a number of short stories in London Magazine, Fiction magazine, Critical Quarterly and three PEN/Arts Council anthologies.
Parker subsequently turned to writing non-fiction, and his first book, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos [4] [5] was published by Constable in 1987. A paperback edition, with a new introduction, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. [6] [7]
Parker's second book Ackerley: The Life of J. R. Ackerley was published by Constable in the UK in 1989 [8] and by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in America. [9] [10] [11] [12]
He edited (and wrote much of) two literary encyclopaedias: A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel [13] [14] published in the UK by Fourth Estate and Helicon in 1994 [15] and in America by Oxford University Press in 1995, and A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers [16] published in the UK by Fourth Estate and Helicon in 1995 [15] [17] and in America by Oxford University Press in 1996.
Parker then wrote the "definitive" biography of Christopher Isherwood which took him 12 years to finish; he said, "I was married to Christopher Isherwood for 12 years and to J. R. Ackerley I think only for four." [18] The book was published in 2004, on the centenary of Isherwood's birth, by Pan Macmillan in the UK under the title Isherwood [19] and by Random House in America under the title Isherwood: A Life Revealed. [20] David Thomson, in The New Republic described it as, "Immense and magnificent … A Life Revealed is a modest subtitle for such a daunting process of reconstruction and re-appraisal." [21]
The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War [22] was published by Fourth Estate on Armistice Day in 2009. Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph wrote, "A fine work of research and of history. Parker tells the story of how the War came to an end and how the aftermath was coped with." [23]
Parker's Housman Country: Into the Heart of England, is cultural history of A Shropshire Lad , was published by Little, Brown in 2016. [24] [25] It was among the Financial Times ', The Spectator 's, the Evening Standard 's and The Sunday Times ' Best Books of 2016. The book was published in the US in 2017 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux [24] [26] and was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and nominated for the 2017 PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography. [27]
Parker wrote a discursive account of the history and origins of plant names in his book A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners [28] published by Little, Brown in 2018. [29] [30]
Parker has edited Some Men In London: Queer Life, 1945 - 1969 [31] , a major anthology which uncovers the rich reality of life for queer men in London. [32] The book, published by Penguin Classics, is divided in two volumes, 1945-1959 and 1960-1967 respectively. Matthew Parris, writing for the Spectator, described it as 'quite simply, a work of genius.' [33]
Parker was an associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) and remains an advisory editor for the regular updates to the project.
Among the books to which Parker has contributed are Scribner's British Writers (on L. P. Hartley, 2002), the seventh edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009), [34] Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (2009) [35] and Britten's Century, published in 2013 to mark the centenary of the composer Benjamin Britten. [36] His edition of G. F. Green's 1952 novel In the Making was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2012, [37] and in 2016 he wrote an introduction to the Slightly Foxed edition of Diana Petre's 1975 memoir The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley. [38] A full-length animated feature film of J. R. Ackerley's book My Dog Tulip , for which he collaborated on the script and acted as advisor to the producers, was released in 2010. [39]
Parker was a member of the executive committee of English PEN from 1993 to 1997 and a trustee of the PEN Literary Foundation, acting as chair from 1999 to 2000. [40] He was on the committee of the London Library from 1999 to 2002, subsequently becoming a trustee (2004–07); chair of the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library Advisory Committee (2009–2013); and vice-chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature (2008–14). [2] From 2014 until 2017 he was a visiting fellow in the School of Arts at the University of Northampton.
Since 1979 Parker has been a frequent contributor of reviews and features to numerous newspapers and magazines, including The Listener, The Independent , The Daily Telegraph , [41] The Sunday Times , [42] The Spectator , [43] The Times Literary Supplement , [44] the New Statesman, [45] The Oldie , Slightly Foxed , [46] Apollo [47] and the gardening quarterly Hortus. [48] [49] He was on the editorial board of the London Library Magazine [50] [51] (2008–2019) while he continues to serve on the editorial board of RIBA's A Magazine. [52] [53] Since 1990 he has been one of the judges of the annual Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography, becoming chair in 2007, [40] and he was for several years one of the judges of the Encore Award for a second novel.
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Alfred Edward Housman was an English classical scholar and poet. After an initially poor performance while at university, he took employment as a clerk in London and established his academic reputation by publishing as a private scholar at first. Later Housman was appointed Professor of Latin at University College London and then at the University of Cambridge. He is now acknowledged as one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest scholars of any time. His editions of Juvenal, Manilius, and Lucan are still considered authoritative.
Wystan Hugh Auden was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes, such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
Joe Randolph "J. R." Ackerley was a British writer and editor. Starting with the BBC the year after its founding in 1927, he was promoted to literary editor of The Listener, its weekly magazine, where he served for more than two decades. He published many emerging poets and writers who became influential in Great Britain. He was openly homosexual, a rarity in his time when homosexual activity was forbidden by law and socially ostracised.
Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke, an English writer best remembered for the novels Party Going, Living, and Loving. He published a total of nine novels between 1926 and 1952. He is considered as one of the group designated in the 1920s/30s as the 'Bright Young People' by the tabloid press.
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Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and for his novel The Line of Beauty the 2004 Booker Prize. Hollinghurst is credited with having helped gay-themed fiction to break into the literary mainstream through his six novels since 1988.
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence". W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding". John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".
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John Burnside FRSL FRSE is a Scottish writer. He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book. In 2023, he won the David Cohen Prize.
Peter May is a Scottish television screenwriter, novelist, and crime writer. He is the recipient of writing awards in Europe and America. The Blackhouse won the U.S. Barry Award for Crime Novel of the Year and the national literature award in France, the Cezam Prix Litteraire. The Lewis Man won the French daily newspaper Le Télégramme's 10,000-euro Grand Prix des Lecteurs. In 2014, Entry Island won both the Deanston's Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and the UK's ITV Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year Award. May's books have sold more than two million copies in the UK and several million internationally.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Tim Lott is a British author. He worked as a music journalist and ran a magazine publishing business, launching Flexipop magazine in 1980 with ex-Record Mirror journalist Barry Cain.
Duncan Fallowell is an English novelist, travel writer, memoirist, journalist and critic.
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Sally Bowles is a fictional character created by English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood and based upon 19-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross. The character debuted in Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles published by Hogarth Press, and commentators have described the novella as "one of Isherwood's most accomplished pieces of writing." The work was republished in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin and in the 1945 anthology The Berlin Stories.
Alison Light, is a writer, critic and independent scholar. She is the author of five books to date. In 2020 A Radical Romance, was awarded the Pen Ackerley prize, the only prize for memoir in the UK. Common People: The History of an English Family (2014) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. She has held a number of academic posts and is currently an Honorary Fellow in History and English at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is also an Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College, London and an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of English, Edinburgh University. She is a founding member of the Raphael Samuel Archive and History Centre in London.
Richard Maxwell Gaskin is a British philosopher who is a professor at the University of Liverpool. He has published on metaphysics, philosophy of language and logic, and history of philosophy, as well as on philosophy of literature, literary theory, and the European literary tradition. Gaskin received his Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Philosophy, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in classics and philosophy at University College, Oxford, and has held academic posts at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, as well as at the University of Sussex.
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a readers guide to 20th century novel peter parker.
isherwood peter parker review.
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