UA Fanthorpe

Ursula Askham Fanthorpe CBE FRSL (born July 22, 1929 in Lee Green, London , † April 28, 2009 in Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire ) was a British poet .

Life

After attending school, Fanthorpe studied at the University of Oxford and the Faculty of Education at the University of London , where she earned a diploma as a teacher . The mid- 1970s , however, she worked as an employee in a hospital in Bristol .

It was during this time that she began her poetic career and, in 1978, published her first volume of poetry , Side Effects , in which her own style of discreet loquacity became clear, with her ironically polite excuses particularly resonating with John Betjeman and Philip Larkin , two of the most popular Lyric poets of Great Britain in the 20th century .

In her poems about nature and the wider human environment, she is doubtful, but capable of real amazement. Her later collections of poetry include Four Dogs (1980), Standing To (1982), Voices Off (1984), and a collection of her most important poems published in 1986.

In 1995 she received the Cholmondeley Award , presented annually by the Society of Authors to several outstanding poets, and was also named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001 for her services to poetry. During this time, the volumes of poetry Consequences (2000) and Christmas Poems (2002) were published before she received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for her complete works in 2003 .

Most recently, two further collections of her poems appeared, Homing In: Selected Local Poems (2006) and Love Poems (2008).

Web links and sources

• Literature by and about UA Fanthorpe in the catalog of the German National Library
• Chambers Biographical Dictionary , Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0550 10051 2 , p. 512
• THE TELEGRAPH: UA Fanthorpe, who died on April 28 aged 79, was a surprising but popular contender to become Poet Laureate when Ted Hughes died in 1998 (April 30, 2009)