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Angus Wilson

(Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson)

(1913 - 1991)

Angus Wilson was one of Britain's most respected twentieth century novelists. His razor-sharp and savagely witty examinations of British manners, characters and social conflicts resonate with a wide readership. He was born in 1913 in Surrey, and went on to work for a variety of organisations including the intelligence services at Bletchley and the British Library before publishing his first book to great acclaim in 1949. He founded the world-famous Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia with Malcolm Bradbury in the late 1960s, and became Chair of the Arts Council's Literature Panel and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was also one of Britain's first openly gay writers, tackling the subject in his writing well before the liberalisation laws of 1967. He was knighted for services to literature in 1980.

Novels

   Hemlock and After (1952)
   Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)
   The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958)
   The Old Men At the Zoo (1961)
   Late Call (1964)
   No Laughing Matter (1967)
   As If by Magic (1973)
   Setting the World On Fire (1980)

Collections

   The Wrong Set (1949)
   Such Darling Dodos (1950)
   A Bit Off the Map (1957)
   Death Dance (1969)
   The Collected Stories of Angus Wilson (1987)

Anthologies edited

Writers of East Anglia (1977)
East Anglia in Verse (1982)

Non fiction show

Angus Wilson recommends

Three Six Seven (1983)
Peter Vansittart
"A rare and splendid novelist."

The Final Programme (1968)
(Jerry Cornelius, book 1)
Michael Moorcock
"One of the most ambitious, illuminating and enjoyable works of fiction published in English since the war."

Eva Trout (1968)
Elizabeth Bowen
"Elizabeth Bowen is the great chronicler of the Second World War, of what it is like to be bombed and evacuated and rationed, and of how these outer events affected the individual human heart."