British writer Alan Brownjohn a "prolific and seemingly indefatigable poet and novelist," died February 23, the Guardian reported. He was 92. Best known as a poet--he received the Cholmondeley award in 1979--Brownjohn also wrote novels, winning the Author's Club prize for his first, The Way You Tell Them (1990), and two children's books, as well as collaborating on plays and working as a freelance writer and critic.
Brownjohn was poetry editor for the New Statesman from 1968 until 1974, and later poetry critic of the Sunday Times for more than 20 years. He served as chairman of the Poetry Society (1982-88) and worked on the Arts Council literature panel.
"In a long writing career Brownjohn was something of a rarity, arguably producing his very best work when already well into his 70s," the Guardian wrote. "Among an array of well-observed, various and spry collections, Ludbrooke & Others (2010) stands out as perhaps most successfully representing his blend of emotionally astute, rigorously downbeat and wittily rendered character dissection."
Brownjohn's early poetic life was bound up with the Group, a long-running workshop run by the poet and teacher Philip Hobsbaum, which fellow poets would attend to discuss and dissect each others' new work. They were chiefly guided by a spirit of close reading, based on the "new criticism" of Hobsbaum's Cambridge tutor F.R. Leavis. During Brownjohn's time as a member, his work was most visibly influenced by the Movement, another loose grouping of associated poets, including Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Larkin remained an enduring influence for Brownjohn, who later published a critical study of him in 1975.
Brownjohn's other books include Nineteen Poems (1980), Collected Poems 1952–1983 (1983), The Old Flea-Pit (1987), The Observation Car (1990), The Way You Tell Them: A Yarn of the Nineties (1990), The Long Shadows (1997), A Funny Old Year (2001), Windows on the Moon (2009), and A Bottle and Other Poems (2015).
His life was, in many ways, "an exemplary version of the contemporary person of letters--a dutiful committee-man and champion of other writers, looking towards Europe and the wider literary world for inspiration and to shine a light on neglected figures, as well as ranging across various art-forms for material," the Guardian noted.
In a 1983 interview, Brownjohn was asked what impression he would like people to take away from his poems. He replied: "I should like people to read my work and think it was like drinking lemonade, only to find a little later that it was strongly laced. I'd want it to go down like lemonade but to hit them like vodka."