Martyn Skinner
Martyn Skinner was a British poet. He won the 1943 Hawthornden Prize for Letters to Malaya and the Heinemann Award in 1947, for the last volume of that title, or the entire collection.
Skinner was born in Fitzhead, Somerset, in southwest England.
According to John Clute, his "most ambitious works were two long narrative poems", or poem sequences. The Return of Arthur "is set in a Near Future England transformed into a totalitarian Dystopia; but a reborn Arthur from another Dimension returns, and the Matter of Britain is again told as the Millennium approaches". Old Rectory is set in a more distant "Ruined Earth Britain, where a hermit mage named Old Rectory decides to return to society and redeem it".
Skinner's correspondence with the novelist R. C. Hutchinson has been published as Two Men of Letters,.Poems
- Sir Elfadore and Mabyna: A Poem in Four Cantos,
- Letters to Malaya
- Two Colloquies – "The Lobster of the Thatch" and "The Recluse",
- The Return of Arthur: A Poem of the Future ; assembled and expanded 1966
- Old Rectory
