Derek Stanford (writer)

Derek Stanford FRSL (1918 – 19 December 2008) was a British writer, known as a biographer, essayist and poet. He was educated at Upper Latymer School, Hammersmith, London.

As a conscientious objector during World War II he served in the Non-Combatant Corps.[1] He edited Resistance, a poetry magazine of just one issue, with David West in 1946.

For a period in the early 1950s he worked with Muriel Spark on several books, and was a supporter of hers (together with the poetic eccentric Hugo Manning, a long-term friend), in the Poetry Society.[2] Stanford described Spark's ousting in Inside the Forties. Spark convinced him of the talent of Dylan Thomas,[3] and Stanford wrote an early book on Thomas shortly after his death.

He died in 2008 in Brighton. His widow is the poet Julie Whitby.

Works

Notes

  1. Poetry & WW2 : lives of the poets
  2. Ivan Savidge, Hugo Manning: Poet and Humanist (1997), pp.51-3.
  3. Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (2003), p. 303.

External links