Robert Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton was a British poet, critic, editor and biographer. He was born on 24 March 1938 in King's Lynn, Norfolk. He graduated from Keble College, Oxford, in 1962 and founded the poetry journal Review, which he edited until 1971. He was the poetry reviewer for London Magazine (1962-4), and poetry critic for The Observer (1965-70). From 1965 to 1973 he worked as poetry and fiction editor for the Times Literary Supplement, and was lecturer in poetry at Hull University from 1971 to 1972. He was editor of New Review from 1974 to 1979, publishing new work by writers including Ian McEwan, Andrew Motion, Tom Paulin and Jim Crace, and presented the BBC television programme 'Bookmark' (1984-7). Ian Hamilton was an acclaimed biographer, whose subjects include Robert Lowell, Matthew Arnold and the footballer Paul Gascoigne. He was the author of several non-fiction books including a study of the rise of literary biography, Keepers of the Flame (1992) and In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988), an account of his attempt to write a biography of the elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye. He edited The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1994) and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays (1999). Sixty Poems, a collection of his poetry, was published in 1999. Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets (2002), is a critical examination of 45 twentieth-century poets. A festschrift for his 60th birthday, Another Round at the Pillars: Essays, Poems, & Reflections on Ian Hamilton, edited by David Harsent, was published in 1999, and Ian Hamilton in Conversation with Dan Jacobson was published in 2002. Ian Hamilton died on 27 December 2001.