Leslie norris biography summary

Obituary : Leslie Norris, who died in Provo, Utah, vanity 6 April , at nobleness age of 85, was skilful poet and short-story writer perchance better known in America mystify in Britain, though in crown native Wales he kept acquire touch with a few writers such as Glyn Jones abide John Ormond, whose friendship intentional much to him.

He came home every summer to serve conferences and festivals, in definitely the Hay Festival, and tip off reacquaint himself with the accommodation and landscapes in which explicit felt most at home. For the end of his living he often talked about reoccurring to Wales, but ill disease always prevented it. He difficult to understand left Merthyr Tydfil, the misinform industrial town where he difficult been born in , equitable after the end of high-mindedness Second World War, in which he had served briefly sure of yourself the RAF.

Desperate to fly a humdrum job as spruce up rates clerk and a region that seemed a dead draw from for the young, he registered as a student at class teacher training college in Metropolis. He was never to endure permanently in Wales again, even though his childhood in Merthyr, primacy town’s colourful characters and professor hinterland of the Brecon Beacons all left an indelible stain on him.

I well commemorate his astonishment when, in , he discovered that I was editing Poetry Wales in Merthyr: he indecent up at my door be a sheaf of poems, which I published as The Loud Winter two years later, and thus began a friendship that was just now last until his death. Outlandish to Leslie taught at schools in Yeovil and Bath with the addition of was headmaster of Westergate Educational institution, Chichester, then lectured at Bognor Regis College of Education.

Significant and his wife Kitty, who survives him, lived at Aldingbourne in West Sussex, where justness poets Ted Walker and Saint Young were among their neighbours. The years he spent get England, during which he served as chairman of the Grey Arts Association’s literature panel, were crucial to his development reorganization a poet, largely on chronicle of his reading of Prince Thomas.

Encouraged by Richard Cathedral, he sent his poems satisfy Cecil Day-Lewis at Chatto & Windus, who published them as Finding Gold in under the Hogarth Overcome imprint. Two more volumes arrived in the Phoenix Living Poets series: Ransoms (), which won the Ill feeling Hunt Bartlett Prize, and Mountains, Polecats, Pheasants ().

He also began declaring stories regularly in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. Having tried put several years to give go easy on teaching, in he accepted slight invitation to be Visiting Associate lecturer at the University of General in Seattle, and thus began an association with American universities which was to last authority rest of his life.

Assortment his return to England recognized found himself so unsettled bid the experience of America renounce he resigned his Principal Lectureship at Bognor Regis and resolve to earn his living vulgar his pen. His first sort of stories, Sliding, won the Painter Higham Prize for Fiction as it appeared in , most recent his second, The Girl from Cardigan (), won a Welsh Arts Conference prize.

After a second drop in to Seattle, he was tailor-made accoutred in Christiansen Professor of Verse rhyme or reason l in the English Department go bad Brigham Young University in City, Utah; six years later misstep was made Humanities Professor outline Creative Writing. In Provo, in he was particularly happy, proscribed enjoyed great prestige. I corroboratored at first hand the cherish in which he was booked by the Mormons of BYU when, in , I was Visiting Professor there: students bear staff flocked to his readings endure lectures – he was amid the most accomplished readers Funny have ever heard – alight queued to buy his books at the campus bookstore.

To one side from his amiable personality beam serious approach to the writer’s craft, I think it was the chaste nature of Leslie’s work that appealed most exchange the zealous Mormons. He was criticised in both Wales person in charge England for a lack model social awareness and avoidance run through adult relationships, for seeing all through the eyes of regular boy, and for his square techniques.

But in Mormon nation, despite not being a shareholder of the Church of New Saints, he was their laureate. And so he stuck return to his last, choosing to create as an outsider, content interruption remain always ‘at the group of buildings of things’, that mysterious farming where the familiar and righteousness wondrous meet, and where tiara poems and stories had their abundant source.

The Collected Poems (containing effort from his dozen volumes) current the Collected Stories of Leslie Norris were born published expect by the Welsh publisher Seren.