Literature of Birmingham

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

puritanism
that developed in the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Birmingham's location away from established centres of power, its dynamic merchant-based economy and its weak aristocracy gave it a reputation as a place where loyalty to the established power structures of church and feudal state were weak, and saw it emerge as a haven for free-thinkers and radicals, encouraging the birth of a vibrant culture of writing, printing and publishing.

The 18th century saw the town's radicalism widen to encompass other literary areas, and while Birmingham's tradition of vigorous literary debate on

travel writing of Bruce Chatwin
.

Writers with roots in Birmingham have had an international influence.

fantasy fiction and one of the bestselling authors in the history of the world; W. H. Auden's work has been called the greatest body of poetry written in the English Language over the last century; while notable contemporary writers from the city include David Lodge, Jim Crace, Roy Fisher and Benjamin Zephaniah
.

The city also has a tradition of distinctive literary subcultures, from the Puritan writers who established the

Highfield and the Birmingham Group. This tradition continues today, with notable groups of writers associated with the University of Birmingham, the Tindal Street Press
, and the city's burgeoning crime fiction, science fiction and poetry scenes.

Medieval and early modern literature

John Rogers, editor of the first complete authorised version of the Bible to be printed in the English language

Little evidence remains of the culture of medieval Birmingham, but with a

King's Norton, and the religious institutions of the Guild of the Holy Cross and the Guild of St. John, Deritend, the area would have supported a substantial community of learned religious men from the 13th century onwards.[1]

The first Birmingham literary figure of lasting significance was

Puritan educational outlook of 18th century Colonial America.[6]

booksellers operating within the town.[12] Between 1635 and 1642 Roberts, Hall and Barton were involved in establishing the first Birmingham Library, one of the earliest public libraries in England.[13]

This culture of radical writing grew with the influx of

Act of Parliament restricting the number of master printers in England meant that literature written and published in Birmingham could not be printed in the town, however, being produced only in London until the Act was repealed in 1693.[16]

Literature of the Midlands Enlightenment

Birmingham during the 18th century lay at the heart of the English experience of the Age of Enlightenment, as the free-thinking dissenting tradition developed in the town over the previous century blossomed into the cultural movement now known as the Midlands Enlightenment.[17] Birmingham's literary infrastructure grew dramatically over the period. At least seven booksellers are recorded as existing by 1733 with the largest in 1786 claiming a stock of 30,000 titles in several languages.[18] Books could be borrowed from the eight or nine commercial lending libraries established over the course of the 18th century, and from more specialist research-driven libraries such as the Birmingham Library and St. Philip's Parish Library.[19] Evidence of printers working in Birmingham can be found from 1713,[15] and the rise of John Baskerville in the 1750s saw the town's printing and publishing industry achieve international significance.[20] By the end of the century Birmingham had developed a highly literate society, and it was claimed that the town's population of around 50,000 read 100,000 books per month.[18]

Elizabeth ("Tetty"), whom he married when both were living in the town in 1735, was the widow of Henry Porter, a Birmingham merchant.[23] Johnson's own literary career started in Birmingham[26] where he lived for three years from 1732 after failing to establish himself as a teacher in his native Lichfield.[27] His essays for Thomas Warren's Birmingham Journal were his first published writing, and it was in Birmingham – also for Warren – that he wrote and had published his first book: a translation of Jerónimo Lobo's A Voyage to Abyssinia.[21] This "combination of the travelogue and religious polemic", with a preface written by Johnson himself, was pitched towards the dissenting culture of the Birmingham area and its widespread suspicion of religious fanaticism, but also aligned Johnson with the empirical and renaissance humanist tradition of the post-reformation European intellectual elite, themes that would emerge repeatedly throughout his following work.[28] This early work also established Johnson's practice of building his literary output around adapting and responding to the work of others – "a sort of rhetoric applied to the print world" – that was to form the basis of his prodigious output over the course of his career.[28] Johnson maintained an extensive set of social and business connections in Birmingham throughout his lifetime and continued to visit the town regularly until a month before his death in 1784.[29]

Sandford and Merton, which remained the most widely read and influential children's book for a century after its publication,[32] and whose proto-socialist outlook was "to play a crucial role in moulding the ethos of nineteenth-century England".[31] Joseph Priestley wrote voluminously on an exceptionally wide range of subjects including theology, history, education and rhetoric. As a philosopher he had considerable contemporary influence, arguing for materialist, determinist and scientific realist viewpoints and influencing the thought of Richard Price, Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant.[33] His political writings centred around the ideas of providentialism and the importance of individual liberty,[33] while his work The Rudiments of English Grammar established him as "one of the great grammarians of his time."[34]

Maecenas of the Midlands".[40]

John Freeth's Coffee House, giving him a national political importance[47] and placing him at the heart of Birmingham's developing political self-consciousness during the upheavals of the American Revolution.[48]

Regency and Victorian literature

19th century fiction

Catherine Hutton

The 19th century saw the short story and the novel emerge as major features of Birmingham's literary output. A transitional figure was Catherine Hutton, the daughter of Birmingham historian William Hutton, who was first notable as a correspondent of many of the leading literary figures of the late 18th century, but who published her first novel The Miser Married in 1813. This was itself written as a series of 63 letters discussing personal, social and literary issues among the fictional correspondents,[49] and was followed by two further epistolary novels – The Welsh Mountaineers in 1817 and Oakwood Hall in 1819.[50]

Isabella Varley Banks was born in Manchester and is best known for her 1876 novel The Manchester Man, but her career as a novelist started only after she moved to Birmingham in 1846 after marrying local journalist, poet and playwright George Linnaeus Banks.[56] Her twelve novels were set in a variety of locations including Birmingham, Yorkshire, Wiltshire, Durham, Chester, and Manchester; each book being particularly notable for its faithful reproduction of local dialect and pronunciation.[57] West Bromwich-born David Christie Murray received his training as a writer as a journalist under George Dawson on the Birmingham Daily Post.[58] Several of his novels were set in Birmingham including A Rising Star of 1894 – the story of a Birmingham reporter with literary aspirations[59] – with many more set in surrounding areas such as the Black Country and Cannock Chase.[60]

George Mogridge started writing for children on religious and moral issues in 1827 after a varied early life that included periods working as a japanner in Birmingham's metal trades and living as a tramp in France. He eventually wrote 226 successful and widely marketed books, including stories, collections, verse and plays; anonymously and under more than 20 pseudonyms including Old Humphrey, Ephraim Holding, Old Father Thames, Peter Parley, Grandfather Gregory, Amos Armfield, Grandmamma Gilbert, Aunt Upton, and X.Y.Z.[65] At the time of his death in 1854 it was estimated that his books had sold a total of over 15 million copies across Britain and America.[66]

The Victorian era also saw Birmingham featuring as a setting for novelists from outside the town, placing it at the forefront of the fictional representation of industrial England's major urban centres.

gothic novel The Star Sapphire of 1896.[71] Passing references in more widely set fiction also provide evidence of Birmingham's growing significance in the culture of Victorian England. Benjamin Disraeli's 1845 novel Sybil uses Birmingham as a background political barometer – "They're always ready for a riot in Birmingham… The sufferings of '39 will keep Birmingham in check",[72] while Charlotte Brontë's 1849 Shirley sees the town at the root of the changes sweeping England – "In Birmingham I considered closely, and at their source, the causes of the present troubles of this country".[73]

Crime fiction, science fiction and other genre fiction

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Victorian period also saw authors with a Birmingham background produce fiction in a far broader range of genres. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, started his career as a writer in Birmingham.[74] His first story "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley" was written and published in 1879 while he was working as a medical assistant in Aston, as was his second "The American's Tale", whose success led his editor to advise him to give up medicine and pursue a full-time literary career.[75] Birmingham appears in Conan Doyle's early stories as Birchespool,[76] and several of Conan Doyle's later Sherlock Holmes stories, including "The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk" and "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs", have explicit Birmingham settings.[77]

Louisa Baldwin wrote poetry, two collections of children's stories and four novels for adults;[80] but is most highly regarded for her gothic ghost stories, which were originally published in literary magazines but were collected together and published as The Shadow on the Blind by John Lane in 1895.[81]

The imaginative adventure novels of Max Pemberton, the Edgbaston-born son of a Birmingham brass foundry owner, sold vastly well, from The Iron Pirate of 1893, a seafaring tale of ironclad buccaneers, to The Garden of Swords, an 1899 story of the Franco-Prussian War.[82] This swashbuckling genre was also represented by the highly successful 1884 novel The Adventures of Maurice Drummore (Royal Marines) by Land and Sea, which claimed to be written by Linden Meadows and illustrated by F. Abell, though both in fact were pseudonyms of the Birmingham-born Charles Butler Greatrex.[83]

The literary output of the Canadian-born author Grant Allen, who was brought up in Birmingham from the age of 13 and attended King Edward's School,[84] was prodigious and varied even by Victorian standards.[85] The Scottish critic Andrew Lang called him "the most versatile, beyond comparison, of any man in our age".[86] Allen is best known for his best-selling but controversial 1895 novel The Woman Who Did, whose tragic plot combined support for free love with opposition to the institution of marriage, and whose success scandalised Victorian society.[87] He is also noted for innovations in detective fiction, creating independent-minded female detectives modelled on the feminist ideal of the New Woman in Miss Cayley's Adventures; and for playing with the conventions of the crime genre in An African Millionaire, where the criminal is the hero, and the short story "The Great Ruby Robbery", where the culprit turns out to be the detective investigating the crime.[88] Allen's incorporation of his own scientific preoccupations into novels such as the time travel-based The British Barbarians also made him an important early pioneer of science fiction. H. G. Wells later wrote to him, acknowledging that "this field of scientific romance with a philosophical element that I am trying to cultivate, properly belongs to you."[89]

Oscott, Newman and the Catholic literary revival

Tory Party than for his literary merit.[93] Lord Acton became the editor of the Catholic monthly The Rambler, a trusted advisor to William Gladstone and one of the leading liberal historians of the 19th century, best known for his editorship of the monumental Cambridge Modern History.[94] The "first great modern philosopher of resistance to the state",[94] he was the originator of the famous aphorism "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".[94] An Oscott student under Wiseman, Acton later remarked on the international influence of the college at the time: "apart from Pekin, Oscott was the centre of the world".[90]

inscape and instress that were to prove central to his poetic practice.[96] The novelist, poet and polemicist Hilaire Belloc came from a long line of Birmingham radicals – his mother was Bessie Rayner Parkes, his grandfather Joseph Parkes and his great-great-grandfather Joseph Priestley. He studied at the Oratory School from 1880 to 1886,[97] and it was there he wrote his first published work Buzenval.[98] The poet Edward Caswall lived at the Oratory from 1852 until his death in 1878, writing his major works Lyra Catholica and The Masque of Mary and other Poems.[99]

T. Sturge Moore that "only a small part of his work is good but that is exceedingly fine".[110]

19th century poetry and drama

Although writing and, particularly, playwrighting were still not considered respectable activities for women throughout much of the period, 19th century Birmingham featured a notable concentration women poets and dramatists. Constance Naden, who was born in Edgbaston and lived most of her life in Birmingham, published two well-received volumes of poetry in the 1880s while studying science at Mason Science College. She has been celebrated as the foremost female poet to hail from Birmingham.[111] Sarah Anne Curzon was born and educated in Birmingham, where she began writing and contributing essays and fiction to periodicals at an early age.[112]

"At any one time there must be five or six supremely intelligent people on the earth," The New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss wrote shortly after Auden's death, "Auden was one of them".[113] Auden's family roots were strongly tied to the West Midlands[114] and he grew up from the age of six months in the Birmingham area, first in Solihull and then in Harborne, the son of George Augustus Auden, the Schools Medical Officer for Birmingham City Council. Auden's early poetry carried strong social, political and economic overtones, reflecting an interest in the thought of Marx and Freud inherited from his father, but his later work was characterised by a greater interest in religious and spiritual issues.[115] The huge range of form, style and subject exhibited by his work, the variety of its outlook and its accessibility and emotional directness initially provoked scepticism amongst modernist critics who placed greater value on consistency and objectivity, but his reputation grew as modernist orthodoxy waned, and he has since increasingly come to be viewed as the first writer of the postmodern era.[116] By 2011 the American critic Edward Mendelson could write: "at the start of the twenty-first century Auden's stature had reached the point where many readers thought it not implausible to judge his work the greatest body of poetry in English of the previous hundred years or more".[116]

Birmingham remained Auden's principal home for three decades, until he left for the United States in 1939[117] (he was noted for going shopping for cigarettes in Harborne in his dressing gown)[118] and he identified with the city throughout his lifetime.[119] Birmingham also featured widely in his work. "As I Walked Out One Evening", one of his best-known early poems, moves a ballad constructed from a series of allusions to folksong and popular culture into the decidedly 20th century context of Bristol Street in Birmingham City Centre.[120] In "Letter to Lord Byron" he rejects the Lake District idyll of William Wordsworth in favour of a decisive if irony-tinged commitment to the contemporary urban landscape of the Midlands, declaring "Clearer the Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on / The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton"; before continuing "Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery / That was, and still is, my ideal scenery".[121] The wider influence of the city on Auden's outlook and work was noted in 1945 by the American critic Edmund Wilson who observed that Auden "in fundamental ways ... doesn't belong in that London literary world – he's more vigorous and more advanced. With his Birmingham background ... he is in some ways more like an American. He is really extremely tough – cares nothing about property or money, popularity or social prestige-does everything on his own and alone."[122]

Auden lay at the forefront of the Auden Group that dominated English poetry of the 1930s and also included the Birmingham-born Rex Warner[123] and the Birmingham-based Louis MacNeice, who had moved to the city from Oxford in 1930 to teach classics at the University of Birmingham. MacNeice's experience of Birmingham's urbanity lay behind the major advances in his poetry in the early 1930s, as his work increasingly reflected the city with the sympathetic detachment that was to become his distinctive poetic voice.[124] His 1935 collection Poems established him as one of the leading new poets of the time, being described by Cecil Day-Lewis as "in some ways the most interesting of the poetical work produced in the last two years" – a particularly significant comparison for a period that included major publications by T. S. Eliot, Auden, Stephen Spender and Day-Lewis himself.[124] As well as marking a high point in his poetic practice, MacNeice's period in Birmingham was one of domestic happiness, abruptly shattered in 1934 when his wife left him and his son to move to the United States with an American football player.[125] In response MacNeice "began to go out a great deal and discovered Birmingham. Discovered that the students were human; discovered that Birmingham had its own writers and artists who were free of the London trade-mark."[126] With his mentor E. R. Dodds leaving the city, however, he came to feel increasingly isolated and in 1936 accepted a lectureship at Bedford College, London.[124]

Early 20th century Birmingham also featured several notable poets who were not associated with the Auden circle.

Surrealist poet during the 1930s. His poetry featured regularly in the London Bulletin, and his 1933 article "Surrealism for the English" advocated that English surrealist poets would need to combine knowledge of "the philosophical position of the French surrealists" with "a knowledge of their own language and literature" two or three years before most people in England had even heard of the movement.[129] Henry Treece, who was born in Wednesbury and educated at the University of Birmingham, led the neo-romantic reaction against Auden Group in the late 1930s and 1940s as one of the founders of the New Apocalyptics,[130] describing the movement in his 1946 work How I See Apocalypse: "In my definition, the writer who senses the chaos, the turbulence, the laughter and the tears, the order and the peace of the world in its entirety, is an Apocalyptic writer. His utterance will be prophetic, for he is observing things which less sensitive men may have not yet come to notice; and as his words are prophetic, they will tend to be incantatory, and so musical."[131]

Highfield and the Birmingham Group

Second World War – and establishing a reputation as a noted radio dramatist.[133] Another radio dramatist associated with the group through MacNeice was Lozells-born R. D. Smith, who later married the novelist Olivia Manning. The architectural writer and critic Nikolaus Pevsner first visited Highfield in 1933 as a refugee from Nazi Germany.[134] From 1934 he lived at the Ladywood home of Francesca Wilson, which housed a varied group of international political refugees,[135] while he conducted the study at the University of Birmingham for Sargeant Florence that led to the publication of Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936 and An Inquiry into Industrial Art in England in 1937: pivotal works in the study of modern design.[136] Also living at Duchess Road was the emigre Russian linguist, classicist and cultural critic Nicholas Bachtin, whom Wilson had met in Paris in 1928 and who was a former member of the "Bakhtin Circle" that had formed in Russia around his brother Mikhail Bakhtin. The literary critic and poet William Empson took refuge at Highfield after his expulsion from Cambridge, living in the city for 6 months and unsuccessfully seeking a post at the university.[137] George Thomson associated with the group after his move to Birmingham in 1937. A classical scholar and Marxist philosopher, he wrote on an extraordinarily wide range of subjects – "kinship, poetry, land tenure, textual criticism, word order, linguistics, religion, Marxism, Thomas Hardy, communist political strategy, and much else".[138]

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was also closely associated with the Highfield group: although living in Cambridge he found Birmingham's intellectual culture more outward-looking and made the city the focus of his primary social circle, being particularly close to Thomson and Bachtin, whom he visited frequently.[139] He had had earlier links with Birmingham, visiting the city regularly in the years leading up to World War I to stay with his friend David Pinsent in Selly Park. It was in Paradise Street opposite Birmingham Town Hall in 1913 that Wittgenstein had dictated the typescript that would become Notes on Logic, his first philosophical work.[140]

Also connected with Highfield were Walter Allen and John Hampson, who formed a link to the separate group of novelists and short story writers known as the Birmingham Group, which formed in 1935 after the American critic Edward O'Brien announced of "a new group of writers emerging in the Midlands, chiefly in and near Birmingham".[141] Despite their reputation as working class novelists, the Birmingham Group had the varied social backgrounds characteristic of highly socially mobile Birmingham.[141] John Hampson was born into a prosperous middle-class family impoverished by the collapse of the family business, living a chequered existence including spending time imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for book theft.[142] His first published novel Saturday Night at the Greyhound was set in a pub in Derbyshire but featured flashbacks to the protagonists' Birmingham backgrounds,[143] proving an unexpected success for the Hogarth Press in 1931 and bringing Hampson fame and literary friendships with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, William Plomer, John Lehmann and E. M. Forster.[144] The Woolfs published Hampson's second novel O Providence – a bleaker semi-autobiographical story of the descent into poverty of a boy born into luxury in Five Ways, written in a sparse, angular style of short unconnected sentences[145] – but they baulked at the explicit homosexual content of Go Seek a Stranger, the stylistically sophisticated portrait of the dilemmas facing a Birmingham-born homosexual man in the 1930s that is considered Hampson's finest work.[146] Hampson published two further Birmingham-set works: 1936's Family Curse and the 1939 short story Good Luck.[143] Walter Allen was born the son of a silversmith in Lozells, but went on to study at the University of Birmingham, becoming a friend of Louis MacNeice and John Hampson while an undergraduate.[147] He established himself as a successful author in the late 1930s with a series of realist novels – including Innocence is Drowned of 1938, Blind Man's Ditch of 1939 and Living Space of 1940 – set in Birmingham and depicting the political and social tensions of working class life.[148] After the war he became well known as a journalist and critic and in 1959 wrote All in a Lifetime, also set in Birmingham and his most highly regarded novel.

The most authentically working class of the Birmingham Group authors was

Lord Mayor James Smith. He was born in Edgbaston and educated at the private Clifton College.[152] A notable motorcycle journalist and writer of short stories for the New Statesman, his novel Sing Holiday is a tale of motor racing set in Birmingham and the Isle of Man.[152] Two further members of the group – Walter Brierley and Hedley Carter – were from Derbyshire and had few connections with Birmingham, attending meetings of the group irregularly.[153]

Despite their variety of style, purpose and genre, the writers of 1930s Birmingham from Auden through Highfield to the Birmingham Group shared some distinctive characteristics – particularly their high level of political engagement and their use of cinematic narrative techniques such as montage in their writing.[154] These were to form their greatest collective influence as, passed on through Hampson, Auden and MacNeice, they were to be adopted by Virginia Woolf and through her much of 1930s literary London.[155]

Early 20th century novelists

The best-known early to mid 20th century novelist associated with Birmingham was J. R. R. Tolkien, whose books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are two of the world's four best-selling books of all time, with over 100 million[156] and over 150 million[157] copies in print respectively. Although Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein in South Africa, he later called this a "fallacious fact"[158] claiming that he "happened to be born there by accident".[159] Both of his parents were from Birmingham[160] and he was brought up in the city from the age of three, living in Sarehole – an area of Hall Green then on the semi-rural southern edge of the city – and in Moseley, Kings Heath, Edgbaston and Rednal.[161] Tolkien later remembered his time in Hall Green in particular as "the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life"[162] and numerous connections have been made between his Birmingham upbringing and features of his work: Sarehole Mill has been seen as the inspiration for the "Great Mill" of The Hobbit; Moseley Bog as the basis of the "Old Forest" of Book One of The Lord of the Rings; and the gothic brick towers of Perrott's Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks – dominating the skyline from the bedroom window of Tolkien's home in Stirling Street, Edgbaston – as the inspiration for "The Two Towers" of Book Two of The Lord of the Rings.[163]

The relationship between Birmingham and Tolkien's universe is a broader one, however. Tolkien's cultural outlook was deeply influenced by the

Forest of Arden landscape that underlay the West Midlands' advancing modernity.[158][166]

Another novelist to take inspiration from the landscape of the early 20th century West Midlands was

North Bromwich", a historically and geographically detailed portrayal of Birmingham and its suburbs that collectively forms the city's most extensive fictional representation.[169]

Like Tolkien, Young saw Birmingham's man-made urbanity and its mechanically driven economy as despoiling influences on the natural beauty and simple lifestyle of the rural Midlands,[170] but other writers took a less nostalgia-driven approach. Hardware: a novel in four books was written in 1914 and is recognised as the major work of the Birmingham-educated author Kineton Parkes. It is set in the Midlands town of "Metlingham", which it depicts in prodigious detail and which is very obviously based on Birmingham.[171] Parkes, like Tolkien, was influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement[172] but his writing also reflected the urbanist values of the Civic Gospel ideology with which the movement in Birmingham was closely associated, concluding "at heart Metlingham was sound: the City and its Council… the life of the City and of its suburbs…".[173] The structure of Hardware was also innovative and progressive, reflecting the fragmentation of urban life through its division into 4 books, 40 chapters and nearly 300 sections in a form that anticipated James Joyce's later work Ulysses.[172]

The most influential

stream of consciousness styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.[177]

Genre fiction

Guinness Book of Records at the time of her death as the world's bestselling living author, with over 700 books to her name having sold 900 million copies.[178] Also notable as a romantic novelist was Jeffery Farnol, who was born in Aston in 1878 and first found work as a Birmingham brass-founder. He wrote over 40 novels that combined regency romance with swashbuckling adventure, becoming an influence on George MacDonald Fraser, Jack Vance and Georgette Heyer,[179] and forming "a link between the major writers of the 19th century and the popular romancers of the present".[180]

  • Charles Talbut Onions: Birmingham born and educated, he was a prominent etymologist who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and was general editor of its shorter version.
  • Sax Rohmer, author of the Fu Manchu thrillers,[181] was the pseudonym of Arthur Henry Ward, who was born in Birmingham but pursued his writing career in London and then New York.

Post-war and contemporary literature

Literary fiction

The University of Birmingham continued as one of the main points of focus for the city's literary culture in the post-war era. The novelist and critic Anthony Burgess worked in the university's extramural department between 1946 and 1950.[182] Of longer lasting influence on Birmingham literature were David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury – the two leading late-20th century practitioners of the campus novel[183] – who both joined the staff of the English Department in the early 1960s, collaborating on the 1963 satirical revue Between these Four Walls for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and becoming lifelong friends.[184] Bradbury wrote his second novel Stepping Westward in the city[185] but moved to the University of East Anglia in 1965,[186] while Lodge remained in Birmingham, retiring in 1987 to concentrate on writing.[187] Many of Lodge's novels are set in Rummidge, "an imaginary city ... which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world".[188] These include Nice Work, described by Arthur Marwick as "the novel of life in Thatcherite Britain",[189] and the Booker Prize shortlisted Small World: An Academic Romance. Lodge's novels use parody and pastiche, formal experiments such as chapters composed entirely of newspaper clippings, and ironic allusions to other literary genres, to examine moral dilemmas and document changes in British society.[187][190]

Jim Crace

Jim Crace moved to Birmingham in 1965 to study at what is now Birmingham City University, where his contemporaries included the novelist and journalist Gordon Burn, whose later writing blurred the lines between fact and fiction to examine the trauma, spectacle and dysfunction of contemporary celebrity,[191] and new gothic psychological novelist Patrick McGrath.[192] Crace wrote short stories from the early 1970s and published his first novel Continent in 1986. Still living in Moseley in the south of the city, his reputation unusually combines both a broad popular readership and substantial acclaim among critics and academics.[193] His work sits outside the social realist mainstream of English novelists, having more in common with European and South American authors such as Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, W. G. Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez.[193] Although his novels have settings as diverse as the Bronze Age, the Judaean Desert in the time of Christ, an 1830s Cornish fishing village and an invented eighth continent, Crace claims that the subject of all of his books is present-day Birmingham, seen through "some idea or inspiration that would allow me to take the subject and dislocate it to another place and time to see if it cracks, if it bends."[194]

Whitbread First Novel Award for her 2004 debut novel Eve Green, which used the forced relocation of an 8-year-old girl from Birmingham to rural Wales to explore themes of loss, loneliness and guilt.[198]

Another focus of literary culture within Birmingham is the

2007 Costa Book Awards.[207] O'Flynn's 2010 second novel The News Where You Are led Fay Weldon to describe her as the "J. G. Ballard of Birmingham", noting how O'Flynn "deals with her particular city, finding poetry and meaning where others see merely boredom and dereliction ... as if the lonely dead of the city's past and present were determined to be heard".[208] Other local writers who've seen notable success with Tindal Street include the Edgbaston-based social worker Gaynor Arnold[209] and the Black Country writers Raphael Selbourne[210] and Anthony Cartwright.[211] The impact of Tindal Street on promoting the city's writers was summed up by The Observer in 2008: "The company has an ability to mine local talent, even when their authors' biographies don't ooze glamour ... There are aspiring authors all over the country writing stories between night shifts, but only in Birmingham, it seems, does anyone pay attention."[212]

Crime fiction, thrillers and science fiction

John Christopher, Charles Eric Maine, J. G. Ballard, and Christopher Priest.[213] 1951's The Day of the Triffids marked the first of a series of novels – including The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos and Chocky – that "with a skilful anatomy, laid bare the abyss beneath the comfortable lives of his audience".[214] Wyndham is one of the few science fiction writers to have successfully crossed over to mainstream appeal, with his post-apocalyptic novels capturing the British mood of unease in the 1950s and making him one of the most important British writers of the early post-war era.[215]

Iain M. Banks, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.[220]

Number 11 Outer Circle bus route as a metaphor for unproductive routine and futility.[223]

Poetry

Benjamin Zephaniah
  • D. J. Enright (born in Leamington Spa) was an Extramural Tutor at Birmingham University between 1950 and 1953. There are references to the city and Black Country in his early poetry.
  • Edward Lowbury came to work as a microbiologist at Birmingham Accident Hospital in 1949. Between then and his departure from the city in 2001 he wrote his most distinguished poetry, as well as the topographical collection Birmingham! Birmingham!
  • Lenrie Peters, the Gambian surgeon and poet, worked at Birmingham Accident Hospital in the early 1960s, during which his early poetry and one novel were written.
  • Enoch Powell was born and raised in Birmingham, and was a poet as well as a politician.
  • Gavin Bantock,[224] grandson of the composer Granville Bantock, was born in Barnt Green in 1939 and educated at Kings Norton Grammar School and Birmingham Theatre School. He has lived in Japan since 1969 but his poetry continues to be published in England.[225]
  • Andrew Bidmead's political polemic 'The Last of England' is set in Birmingham
  • Roshan Doug became the fifth Birmingham Poet Laureate in October 2000. He is the first civic poet to be appointed in the UK from an Indian descent.
  • Julie Boden became the seventh Birmingham Poet Laureate in October 2002.
  • Roy Fisher was born, educated and taught in Birmingham, before moving to the Department of American Studies at Keele University in 1971. Also a poet, his first significant work was City, an evocation of Birmingham. Other local references occur in the "Handsworth Liberties" sequence.
  • Roi Kwabena (1956–2008) lived continuously in the city from 1995 and was its sixth Birmingham Poet Laureate (2001–02). He was also a story-teller, drummer and cultural ambassador.
  • Femi Oyebode, Professor of Psychiatry at the Queen Elizabeth Psychiatric Hospital, has published seven poetry volumes in Nigeria.
  • performance poet
    and children's writer, studied industrial metallurgy at Birmingham University between 1969 and 1972 and lived in the city again between 1974 and 1979, when he began publishing innovatory poetry and prose.
  • Benjamin Zephaniah is a black dub poet from Handsworth who tackles prejudice, poverty and injustice.

Non fiction

Daily Telegraph drama critic Charles Spencer as "undoubtedly the greatest dramatic critic of the 20th century, probably the greatest since Hazlitt"[226] – was born in Hall Green in South Birmingham and educated at King Edward's School.[227]

William Dalrymple in 2011 as "probably the most influential travel book written since the war".[231] Nicholas Shakespeare called Chatwin's work "the most glamorous example of a genre in which so-called 'travel writing' began to embrace a wider range: autobiography, philosophy, history, belles lettres, romantic fiction".[232]

References

  1. ^ Hill 1907, pp. 2–3
  2. OCLC 257597540
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  3. ISBN 0718830423
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  4. ^ Hill 1907, pp. 6–7
  5. ISBN 978-0521131582
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  6. ISBN 9780816066605
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  7. ISBN 0787646539
  8. ^ Hill 1907, pp. 13–14
  9. ^ Vernon, E. C. (2004), "Burgess, Anthony (d. 1664), clergyman and ejected minister", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 7 May 2012
  10. ^ Hill 1907, p. 17
  11. ^ Gilbert, C. D. (2004), "Hall, Thomas (1610–1665), clergyman and ejected minister", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 7 May 2012
  12. ^ Hill 1907, p. 19
  13. ^ Hill 1907, pp. 14–15, 17–18
  14. ^ Hill 1907, pp. 21–22
  15. ^ a b Jones 1970, p. 19
  16. ISBN 0195169212
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  17. doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2007.tb00330.x
  18. ^ a b Money 1977, p. 121
  19. ^ Money 1977, pp. 126–129
  20. ^ Money 1977, p. 122
  21. ^
    ISBN 978-8126908325
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  22. ^ Rogers, Pat (2009), "Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784), author and lexicographer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 7 May 2012
  23. ^
    ISBN 0313294119
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  24. ^ Hill 1907, pp. 27–28
  25. ISBN 0313294119
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  26. ^ Ritchie, Stefka (2004), "Johnson in Birmingham", The occurrences of common life: Samuel Johnson, Practical Science and Industry in the Midlands, Revolutionary Players, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, retrieved 7 May 2012
  27. ISBN 081605133X
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  28. ^
    ISBN 1557866643
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  29. ISBN 0313294119
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  30. ^ a b King-Hele, Desmond (2006), "Erasmus Darwin Biography", Dictionary of Literary Biography (Online ed.), Thomson Gale, retrieved 7 May 2012
  31. ^ a b Rowland, Peter (2007), "Day, Thomas (1748–1789), author and political campaigner", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 7 May 2012
  32. ^ Beasley, Jerry C. (2006), Dictionary of Literary Biography on Thomas Day, Bookrags, Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation, p. 2, retrieved 7 May 2012
  33. ^ a b Tapper, Alan (2006), Joseph Priestley from Dictionary of Literary Biography, Bookrags, Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation, pp. 1–2, retrieved 7 May 2012
  34. ISBN 0271016620
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  35. ISBN 0856648752
    , retrieved 7 May 2012
  36. ^ Hill 1907, p. 24
  37. ^ Garnett, Richard; Carnall, Geoffrey (2004), "Lloyd, Charles (1775–1839), poet", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 7 May 2012
  38. ^ Harris, P. R. (2008), "Cary, Henry Francis (1772–1844), translator", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 7 May 2012
  39. ^ Baines, Paul (2008), "Shenstone, William (1714–1763), writer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 7 May 2012
  40. ISBN 0521522080, retrieved 7 May 2012; Dick, Malcolm, ed. (2004), "Rural Happiness. To a Friend and Moonlight: in the Country", Poetry and the Industrial Revolution in the West Midlands c. 1730–1800
    , Revolutionary Players, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, p. 12, retrieved 7 May 2012
  41. ^ Jones 1970, p. 50
  42. ^ Jones 1970, pp. 9–12
  43. ^ Jones 1970, pp. 17–18
  44. ^ Jones 1970, pp. 19–21
  45. ^ a b Jones 1970, p. 49
  46. ISBN 0904920194
  47. S2CID 145464179
  48. ^ Money 1977, pp. 103–107
  49. ^ Catherine Hutton, Literary Heritage West Midlands, Shropshire County Council, 2004, archived from the original on 14 June 2012, retrieved 5 June 2012
  50. OCLC 478982
  51. ISBN 0826417779
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  52. ^ a b Washington Irving, Birmingham City Council, retrieved 5 June 2012
  53. ISBN 0631234225
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  54. ISBN 1551114763
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  55. ISBN 1438108702
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  56. ISBN 0804718423
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  57. ^ Van Arsdel, Rosemary T. (2008), "Banks, Isabella Varley (née Isabella Varley; known as Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks) (1821–1897), public lecturer and writer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  58. ^ Lee, Elizabeth; Basu, Sayoni (2004), "Murray, David Christie (1847–1907), novelist and journalist", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  59. ^ Hall 2008, pp. 54–55
  60. ^ Hall 2008, p. 54
  61. ^ Dennis, Barbara (2004), "Shorthouse, Joseph Henry (1834–1903), novelist", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  62. ^ Dictionary of Literary Biography on Joseph Henry Shorthouse, Bookrags, Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation, 2006, retrieved 5 June 2012
  63. ISBN 0804718423
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  64. ^ Harrison, Brett (2008), "Worboise (formerly Worboys), Emma Jane (known as Mrs Etherington Guyton) (1825–1887), novelist", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  65. ^ Demers, Patricia (2004), "Mogridge, George (1787–1854), children's writer and religious author", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  66. OCLC 9512462
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  67. ^ Hall 2008, p. 57
  68. ^ Hall 2008, pp. 43–44, 57
  69. ^ Hall 2008, pp. 44–45
  70. ^ Hall 2008, p. 52
  71. ^ Hall 2008, p. 50
  72. ^ Hall 2008, pp. 46–47
  73. ^ Hall 2008, p. 47
  74. ^ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Archives and Heritage, Birmingham City Council, retrieved 5 June 2012
  75. ^ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1859–1930, Masterpiece Theatre – Hound of the Baskervilles – Essays + Interviews, Boston, MA: PBS, 2005, retrieved 1 April 2012
  76. ISBN 0947731857
  77. ISBN 0947731857
  78. ^ Farnell, L. R.; Jann, Rosemary (2008), "Abbott, Edwin Abbott (1838–1926), headmaster and writer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  79. ^ Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions Edwin Abbott, eNotes, Gale Cengage, 2004, retrieved 5 June 2012
  80. ^ Brown, Susan; Clements, Patricia; Grundy, Isobel (2011), Louisa Baldwin, Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  81. ISBN 0804718423
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  82. ISBN 0804718423
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  83. ISBN 0804718423
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  84. ISBN 1551115107
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  85. ^ Richardson, Angelique, Women Who Did, Penguin Classics, retrieved 5 June 2012
  86. ISBN 0754608654
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  87. S2CID 162692167
  88. ISBN 978-1405167659
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  89. ISBN 0754608654
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  90. ^ a b c d St. Mary's College, Oscott, Pope Benedict XVI in the United Kingdom, London: Catholic Communications Network, 2010, archived from the original on 9 March 2012, retrieved 5 June 2012
  91. ISBN 019860534X
  92. ISBN 0804718423
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  93. ^ Biography of Alfred Austin, poemhunter.com, retrieved 5 June 2012
  94. ^ a b c James, A. Walter (2008), "John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton", Encyclopædia Britannica (Britannica Online ed.), Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., retrieved 5 June 2012
  95. ISBN 978-0826496973
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  96. ^ The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume IV: Oxford Essays and Notes 1863–1868, General Catalogue, Oxford University Press, 2006, retrieved 5 June 2012
  97. ISBN 0631199160
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  98. ISBN 0898709423
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  99. ^ Warren, Kate Mary (1908), Edward Caswall, The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York: Robert Appleton Company, retrieved 5 June 2012
  100. ^ D'Arcy, Margaretta (2012), George Moore, Women, Celibacy & the Church, retrieved 5 June 2012
  101. ISBN 0870239929
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  102. ^
    ISBN 0870239929
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  103. ^ a b c Gilcher, Edwin (2006), "Moore, George Augustus (1852–1933), writer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  104. ^ Dictionary of Literary Biography on George Augustus Moore, Bookrags, Thomson Gale, retrieved 5 June 2012
  105. ISBN 0674194446
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  106. ISBN 9780415159821
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  107. ISBN 978-1845113445
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  108. ^ a b c Longford, Elizabeth (2008), "Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen (1840–1922), hedonist, poet, and breeder of Arab horses", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  109. ^ Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Encyclopædia Britannica, retrieved 5 June 2012
  110. JSTOR 3831055
  111. ^ Stainthorp, Clare (2016), "Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden", Jewellery Quarter Research Trust, archived from the original on 4 February 2016, retrieved 17 August 2017
  112. ISBN 978-0231144223
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  113. ISBN 978-0618721931
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  114. ^ Jenkins, Nicholas (2008), The Audens: Rootedness, commentary: "W. H. Auden – Family Ghosts" Website, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, retrieved 5 June 2012
  115. ^ W. H. Auden, Chicago: Poetry Foundation, 2011, retrieved 5 June 2012
  116. ^ a b Mendelson, Edward (2011), "Auden, Wystan Hugh (1907–1973), poet and writer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  117. ISBN 0719033764
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  118. ISBN 0395308534
  119. ISBN 0521536472
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  120. ISBN 0521536472
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  121. ISBN 0521536472
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  122. ISBN 0874137667
    , retrieved 5 June 2011
  123. ISBN 0874137667
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  124. ^ a b c Louis MacNeice 1907–1963, Chicago: Poetry Foundation, 2011, retrieved 5 June 2012
  125. ISBN 0521012457
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  126. ISBN 0571118321
  127. ^ Hibberd, Dominic (2011), "Georgian poets (act. 1912–1922)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 5 June 2012
  128. ISBN 0415159385
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  129. ISBN 0889469326
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  130. ISBN 1438108702
    , retrieved 5 June 2012
  131. ^ The Apocalyptic Movement, eNotes Study Guides, Gale Cengage, 2001, retrieved 5 June 2012
  132. ^ As I Was Walking Down Bristol Street, Lincoln: Media Archive for Central England, 1983, retrieved 8 September 2012; Nichols, Tony (6 March 1999), "Obituaries: Professor Ronald Willetts", The Independent, London: Independent News and Media, retrieved 9 September 2012
  133. ISBN 0415243181
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  134. ISBN 978-1441143860
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  135. ISBN 978-0701168391
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  136. ISBN 978-0415461757
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  137. ISBN 0434018295
  138. ^ Seaford, R. A. S. (2004), "Thomson, George Derwent (1903–1987), classical scholar", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 9 September 2012
  139. ISBN 041503261X
    , retrieved 9 September 2011
  140. ISBN 0099883708
  141. ^ a b Feigel 2007, p. 51
  142. ^ Papers of John Hampson, Archives Hub, 2003, archived from the original on 22 December 2012, retrieved 16 September 2012
  143. ^ a b Hall 2008, p. 43
  144. ^ Southworth 2007, p. 43
  145. ^ Southworth 2007, p. 47
  146. ^ Southworth 2007, p. 48
  147. ^ Feigel 2007, pp. 51–52
  148. ISBN 0192122711
    , retrieved 11 March 2012
  149. ^ Leslie George Halward, Author (1905–1976), retrieved 16 September 2012
  150. ^ Hall 2008, p. 42
  151. ISBN 1550025228
    , retrieved 16 September 2012
  152. ^ a b Hall 2008, p. 40
  153. ^ Southworth 2007, p. 49
  154. ^ Feigel 2007, pp. 54–55
  155. ^ Feigel 2007, p. 56
  156. ^ "Tolkien's Hobbit fetches £60,000", BBC News, 18 March 2008, retrieved 9 September 2012
  157. ^ Wagner, Vit (16 April 2007), "Tolkien proves he's still the king", Toronto Star, Toronto, retrieved 9 September 2012
  158. ^ a b O' Hehir, Andrew (5 June 2001), "The book of the century", Salon.com, Salon Media Group, retrieved 9 September 2012
  159. ISBN 978-0575116665
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  160. ISBN 1843532751
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  161. ISBN 1564147029
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  162. ISBN 0192129880
  163. ^ a b Middleton, Christopher (15 December 2007), "Sites that shaped Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'", Daily Telegraph, London: Telegraph Media Group, retrieved 9 September 2012
  164. ISBN 0-86294-058-3
  165. ^
    ISBN 978-0195343168
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  166. ISBN 978-0786428274
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  167. ^ a b Mullin, Katherine (2004), "Young, Francis Brett (1884–1954), novelist", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 9 September 2012
  168. ^ Hall 2008, p. 11
  169. ^ Hall 2008, pp. 2–3
  170. ^ Hall 2008, pp. 17–18
  171. ^ Hall 2008, pp. 53–54
  172. ^
    ISBN 019860534X
  173. ^ Hall 2008, p. 53
  174. ^ a b Hentea 2011, p. 1
  175. ^ Faulks, Sebastian (24 September 2005), "Caught in the web", The Guardian, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 9 September 2012
  176. ^ Hall 2008, pp. 45–46
  177. ISBN 0195169212
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  178. ^ "Cartland, Barbara", Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston: Boston University, retrieved 16 September 2012
  179. ^ Taylor, Clare L. (2008), "Farnol, (John) Jeffery (1878–1952), novelist", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 16 September 2012
  180. ISBN 091228997X
  181. ^ Several of these can be read on Google Books
  182. ISBN 0877790426
    , retrieved 9 September 2012
  183. ISBN 1405113758
    , retrieved 1 January 2012
  184. ^ Lodge, David (29 November 2000), "He was my literary twin", The Guardian, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 1 January 2012
  185. ISBN 0805716718
    , retrieved 1 January 2012, during their time together at Birmingham, while Lodge was writing The British Museum, Bradbury himself was writing a novel about an Englishman going to teach in an American university, which became Stepping Westward
  186. ^ Lodge, David (2004), "Bradbury, Sir Malcolm Stanley (1932–2000), writer and literary scholar", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 1 January 2012
  187. ^ a b Smith, Jules (2009), Professor David Lodge, Writers, British Council, retrieved 1 January 2012
  188. ISBN 0415048427
    , retrieved 1 January 2012
  189. ISBN 063119522X
    , retrieved 1 January 2012
  190. ^ Tripney, Natasha (27 November 2011), "The Campus Trilogy by David Lodge – review", The Observer, Guardian News and Media, retrieved 1 January 2012
  191. ^ Lea, Richard (20 July 2009), "Groundbreaking author Gordon Burn dies aged 61", The Guardian, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 20 February 2012
  192. ^ Chronology, Jim Crace, 2008, retrieved 21 January 2012
  193. ^ a b Matthews, Sean (2004), Jim Crace, Writers, British Council, retrieved 2 January 2012
  194. ^ Winegardner, Mark (2001), Amazing Crace, Barnes and Noble, retrieved 2 January 2012
  195. ^ a b Jonathan Coe, The Book Show, Sky Arts, retrieved 28 January 2012
  196. ^ Moseley, Merritt (2006), Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jonathan Coe, Bookrags, Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation, pp. 1–2, retrieved 28 January 2012
  197. ^ Mason, Richard (5 September 2004), "The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe – The dread hand of Thatcher over us all", The Independent, London: Independent News and Media, archived from the original on 16 December 2013, retrieved 28 January 2012
  198. ^ Tranter, Susan (200), Susan Fletcher, Writers, London: British Council Literature, retrieved 10 September 2012
  199. ^ A Brief History of Tindal Street Press, Birmingham: Tindal Street Press, 2009, retrieved 9 September 2012
  200. ^ a b Grimley, Terry (8 October 2009), "Tapping into literary talent", Birmingham Post, Birmingham: Trinity Mirror Midlands, retrieved 9 September 2012
  201. ^ Neilan, Catherine (23 September 2009), "Tindal Street to celebrate 'defying the odds'", The Bookseller, London: The Bookseller Media Group, retrieved 9 September 2012
  202. ^ Clare Morrall on Astonishing Splashes of Colour, New York: HarperCollins, retrieved 9 September 2012
  203. ^ Foulkes, Caroline (18 August 2003), "Booker beckons for fledgling author", Birmingham Post, Birmingham: Trinity Mirror Midlands, retrieved 9 September 2012
  204. ^ Hore, Rachel (15 March 2008), "Out of tune – A delicate depiction of dysfunction intrigues Rachel Hore", The Guardian, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 9 September 2012
  205. ^ Williams, Charlotte (2012), The Man Who Lived on a Roundabout, We Love This Book, London: The Bookseller Media Group, retrieved 9 September 2012
  206. ^ Anderson, Hephzibah (28 January 2007), "Now you see her, now you don't", The Observer, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 9 September 2012
  207. ^ "Top prize for author Catherine O'Flynn", Birmingham Post, Birmingham: Trinity Mirror Midlands, 3 January 2008, retrieved 9 September 2012
  208. ^ Fay, Weldon (3 July 2010), "The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn – Fay Weldon applauds a second novel that fulfils the promise of its predecessor", The Guardian, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 9 September 2012
  209. ^ "Gaynor Arnold keeping her word", Birmingham Post, Birmingham: Trinity Mirror Midlands, 2 October 2008, retrieved 9 September 2012
  210. ^ Jackson, Lorne (15 January 2010), "Raphael Selbourne shines a light on hidden world in Beauty", Birmingham Post, Birmingham: Trinity Mirror Midlands, retrieved 9 September 2012
  211. ^ Naffis-Sahely, André (2010), Anthony Cartwright, Writers, London: British Council, archived from the original on 4 September 2012, retrieved 9 September 2012
  212. ^ Segal, Francesca (3 August 2008), "Why Birmingham rules the literary roost", The Observer, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 9 September 2012
  213. ^ Aldiss, Brian W. (2008), "Harris, John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon (pseud. John Wyndham) (1903–1969), writer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 23 September 2012
  214. ISBN 0203009770
    , retrieved 23 September 2012
  215. ^ Sawyer, Andy (2001), The John Wyndham Archive, University of Liverpool Library, retrieved 23 September 2012
  216. ^ a b Dictionary of Literary Biography on Ian Watson, Thomson Gale, 2006, retrieved 23 September 2012
  217. ^ Clute, John; Nicholls, Peter, The Ian Watson Papers, Liverpool: University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives, retrieved 23 September 2012
  218. ^ Clute, John; Nicholls, Peter (2012), Watson, Ian, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Gollancz, retrieved 23 September 2012
  219. ^ Langford, David (1981), An Interview with Ian Watson, Ansible, retrieved 23 September 2012
  220. ^ Moorcock, Michael (13 November 2008), "Barrington Bayley – His 'space operas' inspired a generation of sci-fi writers", The Guardian, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 24 March 2013
  221. ^ Brady, Poppy (21 June 2007), "City author's hoping for a summer hit", Birmingham Mail, Birmingham: Trinity Mirror Midlands, retrieved 3 February 2013
  222. ^ Gill, Rosalind (September 2009), "Lad lit as mediated intimacy: A postfeminist tale of female power, male vulnerability and toast", Working Papers on the Web, 13, Sheffield Hallam University, retrieved 3 February 2013
  223. ^ Grimley, Terry (29 October 1998), "John McCabe – Science of writing a best-seller; Terry Grimley meets John McCabe, Birmingham scientist turned best-selling novelist", Birmingham Post, Birmingham: Birmingham Post & Mail, retrieved 3 February 2013
  224. ^ "Home Page". Archived from the original on 26 January 2008. Retrieved 7 May 2012.
  225. ^ "Anvil Press details". Archived from the original on 30 March 2012. Retrieved 7 May 2012.
  226. ^ Spencer, Charles (29 September 2001), "Starstruck critic with a sting in his tail", Daily Telegraph, London: Telegraph Media Group, retrieved 16 November 2013
  227. ^ Purser, Philip (2011), "Tynan, Kenneth Peacock (1927–1980), theatre critic", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 16 November 2013
  228. ISBN 0140276459
  229. ISBN 0099289970
  230. ^ In Patagonia – Bruce Chatwin, Book Drum, retrieved 9 September 2012
  231. ^ Dalrymple, William (16 September 2011), "My favourite travel book, by the world's greatest travel writers", The Guardian, London: Guardian News and Media, retrieved 9 September 2012
  232. ISBN 0099289970
  233. ^ See a list of these on Google Books

Bibliography

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Literature_of_Birmingham&oldid=1203974948"