James Kirkup

In the Whitehouse v Lemon case, Mary Whitehouse, then Secretary of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, successfully prosecuted the editor of the newspaper, Dennis Lemon, for blasphemous libel under the Blasphemy Act 1697.

James Harold Kirkup, FRSL (23 April 1918 – 10 May 2009) was an English poet, translator and travel writer.

He wrote over 45 books, including autobiographies, novels and plays.

He wrote under many pen-names including James Falconer, Aditya Jha, Jun Honda, Andrew James, Taeko Kawai, Felix Liston, Edward Raeburn, and Ivy B. Summerforest.

Kirkup wrote his first book of poetry there; this was The Drowned Sailor, which was published in 1947.

After the writing of simple verses and rhymes from the age of six, and the publication of The Drowned Sailor in 1947, Kirkup's published works encompassed several dozen collections of poetry, six volumes of autobiography, over a hundred monographs of original work and translations and thousands of shorter pieces in journals and periodicals.

His skilled writing of haiku and tanka is acknowledged internationally.

Many of his poems recall his childhood days in the north-east, and are featured in such publications as The Sense of the Visit, To the Ancestral North, Throwback, and Shields Sketches.

From 1950 to 1952, he was the first Gregory Poetry Fellow at Leeds University, making him the first resident university poet in the United Kingdom.

Kirkup held the Atlantic Award for Literature from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962; he won the Japan P.E.N. Club Prize for Poetry in 1965; and was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation in 1992.

He moved south with his partner to Gloucestershire in 1952, and became a visiting poet at Bath Academy of Art for the next three years.

Moving on from Bath, Kirkup taught in a London grammar school before leaving England in 1956 to live and work in continental Europe, the Americas and the Far East.

In Japan, he found acceptance and appreciation of his work, and he settled there for 30 years, lecturing in English literature at several universities.

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.

James Kirkup was brought up in South Shields, educated at Westoe Secondary School, and then at King's College, Durham University.

During the Second World War he was a conscientious objector, and worked for the Forestry Commission, on the land in the Yorkshire Dales and at the Lansbury Gate Farm, Clavering, Essex.

He taught at The Downs School in Colwall, Malvern, where W. H. Auden had earlier been a master.

Ghosts, Fire, Water was written for the University of Auckland Festival Choir which performed it at the International Universities' Choral Festival in New York and at other concerts on its world tour in 1972.

The poem from Kirkup's anthology No more Hiroshimas: poems and translations was based on three of the Hiroshima Panels.

Audiences were affected by the poignancy and emotional power of the work and it has continued to be part of the choral repertoire.

Kirkup came to public attention in 1977, after the newspaper Gay News published his poem "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name", in which a Roman centurion describes his lust for and attraction to the crucified Jesus.

In the mid-1990s he won the Japanese Festival Foundation Prize for A Book of Tanka.

In 1995, James Hogg and Wolfgang Görtschacher (University of Salzburg Press / Poetry Salzburg) received a letter from Andorra signed by Kirkup, who had just returned from Japan.

Kirkup suggested the republication of some of his early books that had been out of print for quite a while.

At the same time he wanted to offer new manuscripts that would establish the Salzburg imprint as his principal publisher.

What started in 1995 with the collection Strange Attractors and A Certain State of Mind – the latter an anthology of classic, modern and contemporary Japanese haiku – ended after more than a dozen publications with the epic poem Pikadon in 1997.

His home town of South Shields now holds a growing collection of his works in the Central Library, and artefacts from his time in Japan are housed in the nearby Museum.

His last volume of poetry was published during the summer of 2008 by Red Squirrel Press, and was launched at Central Library in South Shields.

He died in Andorra on 10 May 2009.

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Kirkup's papers are held at Yale and South Shields.

New Zealand composer Douglas Mews set two of Kirkup's poems to music: Japan Physical for soprano and piano and Ghosts, Fire, Water for unaccompanied choir and alto solo.