Peter Parker (author)

Education

Parker was born to Edward Parker and Patricia Sturridge^[3] on 2 June 1954 in Herefordshire in the West Midlands of England. He attended the Downs Malvern in Colwall and Canford School in Dorset, and read English literature at University College London. He began a career in literary journalism while working in the Design Centre's bookshop in the 1980s, contributing regular book reviews to Gay News and London Magazine. He published a number of short stories in London Magazine, Fiction magazine, Critical Quarterly and three PEN/Arts Council anthologies.

Books

Parker subsequently turned to writing non-fiction, and his first book, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos^[4][5] was published by Constable in 1987. A paperback edition, with a new introduction, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007.^[6][7]

Parker's second book Ackerley: The Life of J. R. Ackerley was published by Constable in the UK in 1989^[8] and by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in America.^{[9][10][11][12]}

He edited (and wrote much of) two literary encyclopaedias: A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel^[13][14] published in the UK by Fourth Estate and Helicon in 1994^[15] and in America by Oxford University Press in 1995, and A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers^[16] published in the UK by Fourth Estate and Helicon in 1995^[15][17] and in America by Oxford University Press in 1996.

Parker then wrote the "definitive" biography of Christopher Isherwood which took him 12 years to finish; he said, "I was married to Christopher Isherwood for 12 years and to J. R. Ackerley I think only for four."^[18] The book was published in 2004, on the centenary of Isherwood's birth, by Pan Macmillan in the UK under the title Isherwood^[19] and by Random House in America under the title Isherwood: A Life Revealed.^[20] David Thomson, in The New Republic described it as, "Immense and magnificent … A Life Revealed is a modest subtitle for such a daunting process of reconstruction and re-appraisal."^[21]

The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War^[22] was published by Fourth Estate on Armistice Day in 2009. Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph wrote, "A fine work of research and of history. Parker tells the story of how the War came to an end and how the aftermath was coped with."^[23]

Parker's Housman Country: Into the Heart of England, is cultural history of A Shropshire Lad, was published by Little, Brown in 2016.^[24][25] It was among the Financial Times', The Spectator's, the Evening Standard's and The Sunday Times' Best Books of 2016. The book was published in the US in 2017 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux^[24][26] and was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and nominated for the 2017 PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography.^[27]

Parker wrote a discursive account of the history and origins of plant names in his book A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners^[28] published by Little, Brown in 2018.^[29][30]

Parker in London, January 2019

Journalism

Parker was an associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) and remains an advisory editor for the regular updates to the project.

Among the books to which Parker has contributed are Scribner's British Writers (on L. P. Hartley, 2002), the seventh edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009),^[31] Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (2009)^[32] and Britten's Century, published in 2013 to mark the centenary of the composer Benjamin Britten.^[33] His edition of G. F. Green's 1952 novel In the Making was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2012,^[34] and in 2016 he wrote an introduction to the Slightly Foxed edition of Diana Petre's 1975 memoir The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley.^[35] A full-length animated feature film of J. R. Ackerley's book My Dog Tulip, for which he collaborated on the script and acted as advisor to the producers, was released in 2010.^[36]

Parker was a member of the executive committee of English PEN from 1993 to 1997 and a trustee of the PEN Literary Foundation, acting as chair from 1999 to 2000.^[37] He was on the committee of the London Library from 1999 to 2002, subsequently becoming a trustee (2004–07); chair of the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library Advisory Committee (2009–2013); and vice-chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature (2008–14).^[2] From 2014 until 2017 he  was a visiting fellow in the School of Arts at the University of Northampton.

Since 1979 Parker has been a frequent contributor of reviews and features to numerous newspapers and magazines, including The Listener, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph,^[38] The Sunday Times,^[39] The Spectator,^[40] The Times Literary Supplement,^[41] the New Statesman,^[42] The Oldie, Slightly Foxed,^[43] Apollo^[44] and the gardening quarterly Hortus.^[45][46] He was on the editorial board of the London Library Magazine^[47][48] (2008–2019) while he continues to serve on the editorial board of RIBA's A Magazine.^[49][50] Since 1990 he has been one of the judges of the annual PEN Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography, becoming chair in 2007,^[37] and he was for several years one of the judges of the Encore Award for a second novel.

Discover more about Life and career related topics

Colwall

Colwall

Colwall is a civil parish in Herefordshire, England, situated on the border with Worcestershire, nestling on the western side of the Malvern Hills at the heart of the AONB. Areas of the village are known as Colwall Stone, Upper Colwall which shares a common border at the Wyche Cutting with the Malvern suburb of Malvern Wells, and Colwall Green, spread along 2 miles (3.2 km) of the B4218 road, with the historic village core being 1 mile (1.6 km) to the west of Colwall Stone.

Canford School

Canford School

Canford School is a public school. Situated in 300 acres of parkland near to the market town of Wimborne Minster in Dorset, south west England, it is one of the largest schools by area.

English literature

English literature

English literature is literature written in the English language from United Kingdom, its crown dependencies, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and the countries of the former British Empire. The English language has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English, and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia. However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. The English spoken after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a London-based form of English, became widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, was a significant figure in the development of the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King James Bible (1611), and the Great Vowel Shift.

Creative nonfiction

Creative nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.

Gay News

Gay News

Gay News was a fortnightly newspaper in the United Kingdom founded in June 1972 in a collaboration between former members of the Gay Liberation Front and members of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE). At the newspaper's height, circulation was 18,000 to 19,000 copies.

Fiction (magazine)

Fiction (magazine)

Fiction is an American literary magazine founded in 1972 by Mark Jay Mirsky, Donald Barthelme, and Max Frisch. It is published by the City College of New York. This is not the same as the French science fiction magazine Fiction, published from 1953-1990.

Critical Quarterly

Critical Quarterly

Critical Quarterly is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by Wiley. The editor-in-chief is Colin MacCabe. The journal notably published the Black Papers on education starting in 1969.

Bloomsbury Publishing

Bloomsbury Publishing

Bloomsbury Publishing plc is a British worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction. It is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index. Bloomsbury's head office is located in Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden. It has a US publishing office located in New York City, an India publishing office in New Delhi, an Australia sales office in Sydney CBD and other publishing offices in the UK including in Oxford. The company's growth over the past two decades is primarily attributable to the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling and, from 2008, to the development of its academic and professional publishing division.

Constable & Robinson

Constable & Robinson

Constable & Robinson Ltd. is an imprint of Little, Brown which publishes fiction and non-fiction books and ebooks.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. As of 2016 the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret; A Single Man (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".

Century

Century

A century is a period of 100 years. Centuries are numbered ordinally in English and many other languages. The word century comes from the Latin centum, meaning one hundred. Century is sometimes abbreviated as c.