James Fenton

Born in Lincoln, Fenton grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire, the son of Canon John Fenton, a biblical scholar. He was educated at the Durham Choristers School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated with a B.A. degree in 1970. While at school Fenton acquired an enthusiasm for the work of W. H. Auden. At Oxford, his tutor John Fuller, who was writing ''A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden'' at the time, further encouraged that enthusiasm. Auden became perhaps the most significant single influence on Fenton's work. In his first year at university, Fenton won the Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence Our Western Furniture. His first collection, Terminal Moraine (1972) won a Gregory Award. and earlier in his journalistic career, like Hitchens, Fenton had written for Socialist Worker, the weekly paper of the International Socialists. Fenton was an occasional war reporter in Vietnam during the late phase of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. His experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia from summer 1973 form a part of All the Wrong Places (1988). The publication of the book revealed some of Fenton's second thoughts about revolutionary socialism. Between 1978 and 1980, Fenton spent a year in West Berlin as a reporter for The Guardian, sharing a flat with Timothy Garton Ash. In 1983, Fenton accompanied his friend Redmond O'Hanlon to Borneo. A description of the voyage can be found in the book Into the Heart of Borneo. Fenton won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1984 for Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984. He was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1994, a post he held till 1999. The Independent and The New York Review of Books. He once wrote the head column in the editorials of each Friday's Evening Standard. In 2007, he appeared in a list of the "100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain" published by The Independent on Sunday. Fenton's partner is Darryl Pinckney, the prize-winning novelist, playwright and essayist perhaps best known for the novel High Cotton (1992). He was the original English librettist for the musical of Les Misérables but Cameron Mackintosh later replaced him with Herbert Kretzmer. Kretzmer credited Fenton with creating the general structure of the adaptation, and Fenton is credited for additional lyrics, for which he receives royalties, as stipulated in his contract. ==Awards and honours==

• 1968: Our Western Furniture, poetry • 1969: Put Thou Thy Tears into My Bottle, poetry • 1972: Terminal Moraine • 1978: A Vacant Possession, TNR Publications • 1980: A German Requiem: A Poem, Salamander Press, a pamphlet • 1981: Dead Soldiers, Sycamore Press • 1982: The Memory of War: Poems 1968–1982, Salamander Press, 1982, • 1984: Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984 Random House, 1984, These poems combined with those from The Memory of War made up the Penguin volume, The Memory of War and Children in Exile; published in the United States as Children in Exile; Salamander Press • 1983: You Were Marvellous, selected theatre reviews published 1979–1981 • 1986: The Snap Revolution • 1987: Partingtime Hall, co-author with John Fuller, Viking / Salamander Press, comical poems • 1988: All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim, reportage; Viking; Atlantic Monthly Press (1988); reissued with a new introduction by Granta (2005) • 1989: Manila Envelope, self-published book of poems • 1994: Out of Danger, Fenton considers this his second collection of poems. It contains Manila Envelope and later poems; Penguin; Farrar Straus Giroux; winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry • 1998: ''Leonardo's Nephew, art essays from The New York Review of Books'' • 2001: The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, Oxford University Press, 2001, • 2001: A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed Viking / Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2002: (As editor) An introduction to English poetry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, • 2003: The Love Bomb, verse written as a libretto for a composer who rejected it; Penguin / Faber and Faber • 2006: School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts (2006), a history • 2006: Selected Poems, Penguin • 2006: (As editor) The New Faber Book of Love Poems • 2012: Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011 • 2012: The Orphan of Zhao, adaptation of the classic Chinese play for the Royal Shakespeare Company ==See also==