Angus Calder

Angus Calder took a degree in English Literature at Cambridge and produced a doctoral thesis, on Second World War politics in Britain, at the University of Sussex. After The People's War: Britain 1939-1945, published in 1969, his next large scale work was Revolutionary Empire (1981, new edition 1998), a survey of the rise of the English-speaking empires from the fifteenth-century to the American War of Independence. Meanwhile, in 1979, he became Staff Tutor in Arts with the Open University in Scotland, retiring early in 1993 with the title Reader in Cultural Studies. The Myth of the Blitz appeared in 1991, and a collection of essays, Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic in 1994. He co-edited, with Paul Addison, Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of War in the West 1939-1945 (1987).

He has lectured in literature at several African universities and published extensively on nineteenth-century Russian fiction, on African literature, and on English and Scottish literature. For some years he co-edited Journal of Commonwealth Literature. For Penguin, he has edited novels by Dickens, Scott and Waugh and poetry by Burns and R. L. Stevenson. He has latterly collaborated on a comprehensive edition of the hitherto uncollected prose of Hugh MacDairmid. He has published verse here and there all his life, won a Gregory Award in 1967, and brought out his first volume of poems, Waking in Waikato, in 1997.

Since 1971, he has lived in or around Edinburgh, where he was the first Convener of the Scottish Poetry Library, founded in 1984.