Thwaite, Anthony

Anthony Thwaite (1930 – 2021) spent his childhood in Yorkshire, the USA (1940-44) and Somerset. After national service in Libya he read English at Oxford. He then married and went to Japan for two years, where he taught English Literature at Tokyo University. Since then he was a BBC radio producer, literary editor of the Listener and the New Statesman, co-editor of Encounter, and in 1986 was chairman of the Booker Prize judges. He is a literary executor of Philip Larkin and the editor of his Collected Poems. He was a regular reviewer for The Guardian and other journals. In 1990 he was made an OBE for services to poetry.