Douglas Dunn

Douglas Dunn (born October 23, 1942, Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, Scotland) is a Scottish writer and critic best known for his poems evoking working-class British life.

Dunn left school at 17 to become a junior library assistant. He worked at libraries in Britain and the United States before completing his higher education at the University of Hull, England, in 1969. In 1971 he left his job as an assistant librarian at the university—where he worked under Philip Larkin—to pursue his writing.

Dunn’s first book of poetry, Terry Street (1969), was widely hailed for its evocation of working-class Hull. Critics praised Dunn’s dry humour and his ability to capture the sordid with precision, free of sentimentality. Backwaters and Night (both 1971), The Happier Life (1972), and Love or Nothing (1974) were not as well received. Barbarians (1979) is a highly political volume that attacks the sovereignty of the propertied class and Oxbridge intellectuals while arguing for the robustness of “barbarian” working-class culture. Although most critics generally admired the work, they had greater praise for St. Kilda’s Parliament (1981), noting Dunn’s mastery of blank verse and his treatment of Scottish themes. Europa’s Lover (1982) is a long poem celebrating the best of European values.

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Dunn’s highly praised Elegies (1985) contains moving unflinching poems on the death of his first wife in 1981. The volume was awarded the Whitbread Book Award (now the Costa Book Award) for poetry. Northlight (1988) marks Dunn’s return to social subjects. Dante’s Drum-Kit (1993) consists of poems written in terza rima, the rhyme structure used by Dante in The Divine Comedy. The Donkey’s Ears: Politovsky’s Letters Home (2000) is a long epistolary poem from the perspective of a figure from an early 20th-century maritime tragedy. The Year’s Afternoon (2000) meditates on memory and solitude. After New Selected Poems: 1964–2000 (2003), Dunn did not release another collection until The Noise of a Fly (2017), which reflects on aging and death while also exploring current events.

In addition to several television and radio plays, including Scotsmen by Moonlight (1977), Dunn also published the short-story collections Secret Villages (1985) and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1995). He edited a number of anthologies, notably The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories (1995) and The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry (2006). Dunn was created an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2003. He won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013.