Welcome

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Thanks for visiting my website.  I’m a writer and academic, and you can find out more about my work here.  I am a Professor of British Literature and Culture, and I mostly work on the literature of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the Edwardian era, the First World War, and the 1920s and 30s, including the later impact of that literature through to the present day.  I have published widely on Edward Thomas (1878-1917) and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), but I also work on D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), who is the subject of my next book, which is due to be published in May 2026. I have appeared on various television programmes, radio programmes and podcasts.

My biography of war poet Wilfred Owen was published by Yale University Press in 2014 (with the paperback in October 2015). My next book for Yale University Press, Peace At Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, 11 November 1918, was published in 2018.  Both books were widely reviewed. Peace at Last was published in paperback in December 2022.

Peace at Last was ‘Book of the Week’ in The Evening Standard, and it was included in the Daily Telegraph‘s ‘Books of the Year’, The New Statesman‘s ‘Best Books of 2018’ and in the ‘Best Books of 2018’ in Gulf News.  My biography of Wilfred Owen was a Daily Mail ‘Book of the Week’ and ‘Must Read’, in ‘Top Ten Biographies of the Year: 2014’ in Booklist, in ‘Books of the Year’ at the New Zealand Book Council, in the BBC’s ‘Books of 2014’, and in ‘Pick of the Paperbacks’ in The Sunday Times.

I studied at St Andrews University (MA) and then at The Queen’s College, Oxford University (M.Phil and D.Phil).

A General Editor of Edward Thomas’s prose for Oxford University Press, I am currently editing my third volume of Edward Thomas’s prose for that series.  My first two volumes of his prose were published in 2011.  I also co-edited Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (2007).  I gave the British Academy’s Chatterton Lecture on Poetry in 2018. This lecture was published by The Journal of the British Academy: ‘”I should want nothing more”: Edward Thomas and Simplicity’.  On 3 March 2022, I gave my inaugural professorial lecture: ‘A Return to Nature: The pursuit of “the simple life”, from Edward Thomas to the present day’.  The recording is now available on YouTube.

Recent media appearances include In Our Time (BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds) and several episodes of Shedunnit (BBC Sounds).  I have been interviewed on Songs of Praise, I was a member of the studio panel for the BBC’s ‘Remembrance Sunday: The Cenotaph’, and I was the on-screen expert for a BBC film about Wilfred Owen.

 

‘[a] brilliant portrayal of Britain on the day that peace broke out, when people could believe there was an end to the war to end all wars. He weaves a wonderful tapestry of the mood and events across the country, drawing on a wide range of local and regional newspapers. It is accessible history at its best. […] outstanding’

(Peace At Last, The Evening Standard, 8 November 2018)

 

 

 

email: guywjc [at] gmail.com