Alan Brownjohn
Alan Charles Brownjohn FRSL is an English poet and novelist. He has also worked as a teacher, lecturer, critic and broadcaster.Life and work
Alan Brownjohn was born in London and educated at Merton College, Oxford. He taught in schools between 1957 and 1965, and lectured at Battersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until 1979, when he became a full-time writer. He participated in Philip Hobsbaum's weekly poetry discussion meetings known as The Group, which also included Peter Porter, Martin Bell, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth and Edward Lucie-Smith.
Brownjohn is a Patron of Humanists UK. He stood as the Labour Party candidate for Richmond in the 1964 general election, polling in second place.
Reviewing Brownjohn's Collected Poems, Anthony Thwaite wrote in The Guardian: "...he is a social poet in the sense that if people in the future want to know what many lives were like in the second half of the 20th century, they should read Alan Brownjohn - observant, troubled, humane, scrupulous, wry, funny."
