James Martin Fenton (born 25 April 1949) is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Life and career
Born in Lincoln, Fenton grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire, the son of Canon John Fenton, a biblical scholar. He was educated at the Durham Choristers School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated with a B.A. degree in 1970.
While at school Fenton acquired an enthusiasm for the work of W. H. Auden. At Oxford, his tutor John Fuller, who was writing A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden at the time, further encouraged that enthusiasm. Auden became perhaps the most significant single influence on Fenton's work.
In his first year at university, Fenton won the Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence Our Western Furniture.
His first collection, Terminal Moraine (1972) won a Gregory Award. and earlier in his journalistic career, like Hitchens, Fenton had written for Socialist Worker, the party's weekly paper. Fenton was an occasional war reporter in Vietnam during the late phase of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. His experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia from summer 1973 form a part of All the Wrong Places (1988). The publication of the book revealed some of Fenton's second thoughts about revolutionary socialism. Between 1978 and 1980, Fenton spent a year in West Berlin as a reporter for The Guardian, sharing a flat with Timothy Garton Ash.
In 1983, Fenton accompanied his friend Redmond O'Hanlon to Borneo. A description of the voyage can be found in the book Into the Heart of Borneo.
Fenton won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1984 for Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984. He was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1994, a post he held till 1999. The Independent and The New York Review of Books. He once wrote the head column in the editorials of each Friday's Evening Standard. In 2007, he appeared in a list of the "100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain" published by The Independent on Sunday.
Fenton's partner is Darryl Pinckney, the prize-winning novelist, playwright and essayist perhaps best known for the novel High Cotton (1992).</poem>
He was the original English librettist for the musical of Les Misérables but Cameron Mackintosh later replaced him with Herbert Kretzmer. Kretzmer credited Fenton with creating the general structure of the adaptation, and Fenton is credited for additional lyrics, for which he receives royalties, as stipulated in his contract.
Awards and honours
Books
- 1968: Our Western Furniture, poetry
- 1969: Put Thou Thy Tears into My Bottle, poetry