James Fenton

James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. He has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent and columnist. A collection of his pieces on major events in the Far East entitled All the Wrong Places was published by Penguin in 1990.

His volumes of poetry include Terminal Moraine, The Memory of War and Children in Exile and Out of Danger. These last two volumes are published in Penguin. His work has won him the Southern Arts Literature Award for Poetry, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Award for Poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994-99.