Anthony Thwaite, the poet, editor, author and reviewer who was a "mover and shaker in postwar English literary life," died last week, the Guardian reported. He was 90 years old.
Thwaite published Home Truths, his first book of poems, in 1957. He went on to publish numerous collections, including The Stone of Emptiness (1967), New Confessions (1974) and Victorian Voices (1980), which was his most popular and bestselling title. In 2007, Enitharmon Press published Thwaite's Collected Poems, and the volumes Late Poems and Going Out followed in 2010 and 2015. In 1990, he was appointed Order of the British Empire.
While he was associated with the literary group the Movement, which consisted of writers like Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jennings, Thwaite's work differed in its outlook and its emphasis. His marriage and his faith were prominent subjects, and he was a lover of archeology. He was particularly fascinated with Greek and Roman ruins in North Africa, and he even took part in an archeological dig in Tocra, Libya.
His perspective was also more global than that of many of his peers. In addition to his travels in Libya, he spent part of his childhood in the U.S., where he searched for Civil War relics in Confederate trenches in Fairfax County, Va., and he taught literature in Tokyo for two years.
Over the course of his career, Thwaite worked for the BBC and its weekly journal the Listener, where he was literary editor. He was also literary editor of the New Statesman from 1967 until 1972, and was co-editor of Encounter. In 1986, he chaired the Booker prize panel and read all 128 submitted novels.
Thwaite was a longtime friend of Philip Larkin, and after Larkin's death in 1985 he served as Larkin's literary executor, editing Larkin's Collected Poems (1988), Selected Letters (1992) and Letters to Monica (2010).