Bernard Kops

British playwright, novelist, and poet

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History

Bernard Kops (born November 28, 1926, London, England—died February 25, 2024, United Kingdom) was an English playwright, novelist, and poet known for his works of unabashed sentimentality.

Kops left school at the age of 13 and worked at various odd jobs before beginning to write. He established himself with his first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1959), a reversal of the family relationships depicted in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ending happily in an affirmation of the human spirit. Among his other plays were The Dream of Peter Mann (1960), an apocalyptic drama in which much of the action occurs as a dream, and Playing Sinatra (1991), which centres on a brother and sister obsessed with the legendary performer. Kops’s early life of poverty and his Jewish background informs much of his work, including Enter Solly Gold (1961), in which a con artist convinces a Jewish millionaire that he is the Messiah in order to steal his money, the surrealistic drama Ezra (produced 1981), based on the personality of the American poet Ezra Pound, and Dreams of Anne Frank (1998).

Kops’s novels included Awake for Mourning (1958), The Dissent of Dominick Shapiro (1966), and The Odyssey of Samuel Glass (2012). He also wrote the autobiographies The World Is a Wedding (1963) and Shalom Bomb (2000) as well as several radio and television plays. Barricades in West Hampstead (1988) and Love, Death and Other Joys (2018) were among Kops’s many collections of poetry.