John Lucas (poet)

John Lucas (born 1937) is a poet, critic, biographer, anthologist and literary historian. He runs a poetry publishers called Shoestring Press, and he is the author of 92 Acharnon Street (Eland, 2007), which won the Dolman Best Travel Book Award in 2008.

Biography

Lucas was born in Devon in 1937. He has taught English at universities throughout the world, and is Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent. He has written and translated over forty books, including critical studies of Dickens, John Clare and Arnold Bennett, books on English poetry, an anthology of the works of Nancy Cunard, as well as a life of his maternal grandfather, which combines biography with social history. In 2010 he published Next Year Will Be Better: A Memoir of England in the 1950s. Since 2011, Lucas has also written several novels, including Waterdrops (2011).

His collections of poetry include Studying Grosz on the Bus, winner of Aldeburgh Festival Poetry Prize, A World Perhaps: New & Selected Poems, Flute Music and Things to Say. He has also edited an anthology, The Isles of Greece, for Eland. For over ten years he was poetry reviewer for the New Statesman. His most recent books include A World Perhaps: New and Selected Poems, The Radical Twenties: Writing, Politics, Culture, and The Good That We Do.

Lucas plays jazz cornet and trumpet with the Nottingham-based Burgundy Street Jazzmen. In 1994 he founded Shoestring Press.

Bibliography

• Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-century Fiction: critical essays on some English and American novels (with David Howard and John Goode) 1966
• A Selection from George Crabbe (as editor) 1967
• The Melancholy Man: a study of Dickens's novels 1970
• About Nottingham: twelve poems 1971
• Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century: essays (as editor) 1971
• A Brief Bestiary: Poems 1972
• Arnold Bennett, a study of his fiction 1974
• Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth-century provincial novel 1977
• The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy (as editor) 1978
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (editor) 1980
• Poems of G. S. Fraser (edited with Ian Fletcher) 1981
• Romantic to modern literature: essays and ideas of culture, 1750-1900 1982
• The Days of the Week (poems) 1982
• Moderns and Contemporaries: novelists, poets, critics 1985
• The Trent Bridge Battery: the story of the sporting Gunns (with Basil Haynes)
• Egil's saga (translator, with Christine Fell) 1985
• Modern English Poetry from Hardy to Hughes 1986
• Selected Writings: Oliver Goldsmith (as editor) 1988
• Studying Grosz on the Bus (poems) 1989
• England and Englishness: ideas of nationhood in English poetry, 1688-1900 1990
• D. H. Lawrence: Selected Poetry and Non-Fictional Prose (as editor) 1990
• Charles Dickens: the Major Novels 1992
• Flying to Romania 1992
• New Lines from Leicestershire: a verse anthology (as editor) 1992
• John Clare 1994
• Writing and Radicalism (as editor) 1996
• The Radical Twenties 1997
• One For the Piano: Poems 1998
• For John Clare: An Anthology of Verse 1997
• Robert Bloomfield: Selected Poems (as editor, with John Goodridge) 1998
• William Blake 1998
• Stanley Middleton at Eighty (as editor, with David Belbin) 1998
• On the Track (poems) 2000
• Ivor Gurney 2001
• Starting to Explain: essays on twentieth century British and Irish poetry 2003
• The Long and the Short of it 2004
• A World Perhaps: New and Selected Poems 2004
• Poetry: the Nottingham Collection (as editor) 2005
• Poems of Nancy Cunard: from the Bodleian Library (as editor) 2005
• The Winter's Tale 2005
• Flute Music (poems) 2006
• 92 Acharnon Street: A Year in Athens 2007
• Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy: Richard II - Henry V 2007
• I, the poet Egil : versions of the poems of Egil's saga 2008
• Harry Chambers & Peterloo Poets: 37 years of poetry publishing 2009
• Shoestring's Commons (as editor) 2009
• All My Eye & Betty Martin 2010
• The Isles of Greece: a collection of the poetry of place 2010
• Next Year Will Be Better: A Memoir of England in the 1950s 2010
• Things to Say 2010
• Waterdrops 2011 (novel)
• Second World War Poetry in English 2013
• A Brief History of Whistling (with Allan Chatburn) 2015
• Portable Property 2015
• The Awkward Squad: rebels in English cricket 2015
• Ten Poems About Nottingham 2015 (as editor)
• The Plotting 2016 (novel)
• Summer Nineteen Forty-Five 2017 (novel)
• Julia 2019 (novel)
• Remembered Acts 2020 (novel)
• The Life in Us 2021 (novel)
• Closing Time at the Royal Oak 2021 (memoir)
• That Little Thread 2023 (novel)