|
|
Co-Editor About Larkin
Literary Adviser & Co-Editor About Larkin
|
Literary Adviser
& Co-Editor About Larkin
James Booth.
|
Professor James Booth
James Booth was appointed to a Junior Lectureship in the University of Hull in 1968, picking his way through a student sit-in in order to reach his interview. He still has a letter from the Librarian, Philip Larkin, defending the staff loan renewal system on the grounds that books were at that time increasingly being stolen. Apart from semesters in Nigeria (1978-9) and Jamaica (1984) James has remained in Hull. His research interests range widely, his publications including Writers and Politics in Nigeria (Hodder and Stoughton, 1981), and Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles: vol.48 Northern Museums
(OUP and the British Academy, 1997). He is an authority on the coinage of the eighth-century Kingdom of Northumbria.
He has published two books on Philip Larkin: Philip Larkin: Writer (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) and Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). He has also edited Larkin's early girl's-school stories and poems as Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions (Faber, 2002), and a volume of critical essays, New
Larkin's for Old (Macmillan 2000), arising from the first Hull International Conference on the Work of Philip Larkin mounted by the Society in 1997. He is currently head of The Department of English at the University of Hull.
After initially opposing the idea of a Larkin Society, on the grounds that Larkin himself would have derided the idea, James joined shortly after the PLS's inception in 1995. He has remained on the committee ever since in a variety of roles. In 1997, following the crisis which led the Society to dispense with its paid secretary, Janet Whitehead, James took over from Jean Hartley as editor of About Larkin, overseeing nine issues (nos. 6-14). For many years he was the Society's first contact point for membership and merchandising enquiries, though much of this work has now been taken up by abler hands. He catalogued Larkin's effects from 105 Newland Avenue, bought by the Society following the death of Monica Jones in 2001 (now on loan to the Hull Museums Service and the East Riding Museums Service). Later he assisted Maeve Brennan in writing her Memoir
The Philip Larkin I Knew (Manchester University Press 2002). James was Chairman of the Conference Organising committee for the first and third Hull International Larkin Conferences (1997,2007). He is a member of the newly founded Philip Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing in the University, and liaises between the Centre and the Society.
Contact The Society Literary Advisor
|
