Alan Brownjohn

Alan Charles Brownjohn was an English poet and novelist. He also worked as a teacher, lecturer, critic and broadcaster.

Life and work

Alan Charles Brownjohn was born in London, England, on 28 July 1931. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford. He taught in schools between 1957 and 1965.
In 1960 he married the writer Shirley Toulson and in 1962 both were elected as Labour councillors in the Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council, and Brownjohn stood as the Labour Party candidate for Richmond in the 1964 general election, polling in second place. He and Toulson divorced in 1969.
Brownjohn was an inspirational English teacher at Beckenham and Penge Boys Grammar School until 1965. He moved to lecture at Battersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until 1979, when he became a full-time writer. He participated in Philip Hobsbaum's weekly poetry discussion meetings known as The Group, which also included Peter Porter, Martin Bell, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth and Edward Lucie-Smith.
Brownjohn was a Patron of Humanists UK. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
Reviewing Brownjohn's Collected Poems, Anthony Thwaite wrote in The Guardian: "...he is a social poet in the sense that if people in the future want to know what many lives were like in the second half of the 20th century, they should read Alan Brownjohn - observant, troubled, humane, scrupulous, wry, funny."
Alan Brownjohn died on 23 February 2024, at the age of 92.