James Fenton

James Fenton (born April 25, 1949, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England) is an English poet and journalist who was remarked upon for his facility with a wide variety of verse styles and for the liberal political views threading his oeuvre.

Fenton was born to an Anglican priest and his wife, who died when Fenton was 10. After studying at the Chorister School in Durham, where he performed with the cathedral’s renowned choir, he attended the Repton School and the British Institute of Florence. Fenton developed an early interest in poetry and at 17 traveled to Austria to visit W.H. Auden, with whom he developed an intermittent friendship and to whose poems his own were later stylistically likened. In 1967 he enrolled at Magdalen College, Oxford, initially intending to study English but later switching to psychology, philosophy, and physiology. There he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, a contest wherein students wrote poetry on a set topic, in this case the opening of trade and diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States in 1853–54. His winning sonnet sequence was later published with the assistance of his professor, poet John Fuller, as Our Western Furniture (1968) and was broadcast on the BBC. Another set of poems was published by Fuller’s press as the broadsheet Put Thou Thy Tears into My Bottle (1969).

Upon graduation in 1970, Fenton embarked upon a career as a freelance journalist and was hired (1971) to report on literature and politics for the New Statesman. In 1973 Terminal Moraine (1972), his first full-length collection of poetry, won the Eric Gregory Award. The proceeds financed his journey that year to Cambodia, where he reported on the Khmer Rouge, and then to Vietnam, where he witnessed the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in April 1975. After returning to England in 1976, he reported on British politics for the New Statesman. Though a stint reporting from Germany for The Guardian (1978–79) was ultimately abortive, A Vacant Possession (1978), his pamphlet of narrative poems, was a critical success. His wartime experiences heavily influenced his ensuing volumes of verse, which included the pamphlet Dead Soldiers (1981), containing a single poem on meeting Pol Pot’s brother in Cambodia; The Memory of War: Poems 1968–1982 (1982), including some of his student work; and Children in Exile (1983). Fenton’s poems ranged from narrative to nonsense. Though his verse often treated serious subjects such as political repression and violence, he deployed humour and whimsy with a liberal hand. While reporting from the Philippines for The Independent in 1986–89, he witnessed the fall of the abusive authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos. His experiences there provided fodder for the poems in Manila Envelope (1989). All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim (1988) was an account of his journalistic experiences.

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Fenton was also active in the theatre scene. In 1979 he became a theatre critic for The Sunday Times, for which he also later served as a book critic. His theatre reviews were later collected as You Were Marvellous (1983). His English translation of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto was staged by the English National Opera in 1982. The production, which transplanted the story to the Mafia underworld of 1950s New York City, was a success, and it caught the eye of theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh, who asked him to translate the French musical Les Misérables, based on the book by Victor Hugo. Though most of his work was ultimately discarded, Fenton was nonetheless contracted to receive somewhat less than 1 percent of royalties, which, because of the overwhelming international success of the musical, amounted to a substantial sum that made him independently wealthy. His translation of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra was staged by the English National Opera in 1985, and he wrote the libretto for the operatic adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s tale Haroun and the Sea of Stories, staged at the New York City Opera (2004). Fenton’s adaptations of the Chinese play Zhaoshi guer (The Orphan of Zhao) and Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote were produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012 and 2016, respectively.

Further volumes of poetry included Out of Danger (1994), which won the Whitbread Book Award (now the Costa Book Award); Selected Poems (2006), a Penguin anthology of his work; and Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011 (2012), an even broader survey containing previously uncollected verse. A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed (2001) inventoried some of Fenton’s favourite plants and his philosophy on how they should be planted. Two libretti and an oratorio were published as The Love Bomb (2003).

Fenton was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983. He later served as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1994–99), and lectures given during his tenure in that post were collected as The Strength of Poetry (2001). He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2007 and won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2015.