Kit Wright

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	Photo: © Penguin Books

Biography

Poet and children's author Kit Wright was born in 1944 and educated at Oxford University. He lectured in Canada, before working as Education Officer at the Poetry Society in London (1970-75) and was Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University (1977-9). He was awarded an Arts Council Writers' Award in 1985.

His books of poetry include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and Short Afternoons (1989), which won the Hawthornden Prize and was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (2000).

His latest book of poetry is The Magic Box: Poems for Children (2009).

Kit Wright lives in London.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Children, Poetry

Bibliography

Soundings: A Selection of Poems for Reading Aloud   (editor)   Heinemann Education, 1975

The Bear Looked Over the Mountain   Salamander, 1977

Arthur's Father   (illustrated by Eileen Brown)   Methuen, 1978

Arthur's Granny   (illustrated by Eileen Brown)   Methuen, 1978

Arthur's Sister   (illustrated by Eileen Brown)   Methuen, 1978

Arthur's Uncle   (illustrated by Eileen Brown)   Methuen, 1978

Rabbiting On: and Other Poems   (illustrated by Posy Simmonds)   Fontana Lions, 1978

Hot Dog and Other Poems   (illustrated by Posy Simmonds)   Kestrel, 1981

Professor Potts Meets the Animals in Africa   Watts, 1981

Hot Dog and Other Poems   Puffin, 1982

Bump-Starting the Hearse   Hutchinson, 1983

From the Day Room   Windows Project, 1983

Poems for Ten Year Olds and Over   Viking Kestrel, 1984

Poems for Nine Year Olds and Under   Puffin, 1985

Cat Among the Pigeons   Viking Kestrel, 1987

One of Your Legs is Both the Same: A Poem   Turret, 1987

Poems 1974-1983   Hutchinson, 1988

Short Afternoons   Hutchinson, 1989

Puffin Portable Poets   (contributor)   Puffin, 1990

Funnybunch: New Puffin Book of Funny Verse   Viking, 1993

Tigerella   (illustrated by Peter Bailey)   André Deutsch, 1993

Great Snakes   (illustrated by Posy Simmonds)   Viking, 1994

Dolphinella   (illustrated by Peter Bailey)   André Deutsch, 1995

Rumpelstiltskin   Scholastic, 1998

Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000   Leviathan, 2000

Write Away   Times Supplements, 2000

A Lisbon Sheaf   Kings Lynn Poetry Festival, 2001

Seaweed Their Pasture   (illustrated by Marie Kaufmann)   Kessinger Publishing, 2007

The Magic Box: Poems for Children   (illustrated by Peter Bailey)   Macmillan Children's Books, 2009

Read about books by Kit Wright at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Kit Wright at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1977   Alice Hunt Bartlett Award   The Bear Looked Over the Mountain

1978   Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize   The Bear Looked Over the Mountain

1985   Arts Council Writers' Award

1990   Heinemann Award   Short Afternoons

1991   Hawthornden Prize   Short Afternoons

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Critical Perspective

Kit Wright has Betjeman's fondness for places, thumping comic rhymes and also some of his sadness and sense of the oddity of the human animal. He has always had technical mastery of traditional verse forms and his style was fully formed from the start. Many of his poems are close to songs, as in 'Wailing in Wandsworth' from Bump-Starting the Hearse (1983):

'Lovers who would pet and fondle
All along the river Wandle,
Running down through Wansdworth Town,
Leafily, are gone.'

But he is also capable of a toughness way beyond Betjeman's scope. 'I Found South African Breweries Most Hospitable' is a devastating indictment of unprincipled careerism in the face of tyranny, specifically the rebel tour of South Africa by English cricketers in 1982 at the height of Apartheid:

'They keep falling out of windows they must be clumsy
And unprofessional, not that anyone told me,
Spare me your wittering, spare me your whimsy,
Sixty thousand pounds is what they sold me.'

Wright's technical facility is at the service of a kindly temperament. His is almost the opposite of a satirist, in that when you might expect him to be scoring points he remains generous to all. 'Old Hands' paints a sympathetic portrait of the workers at the National Secular Society, but it ends with a visit to his mother, a Christian:

'She'll be on her knees, weeding the churchyard
With the same hands as theirs.'

He doesn't make great claims for poetry. Against the notion of William Carlos Williams that it is tragic that some people live and die oblivious of the consoling power of poetry he writes:

'When they say
That every day
Men die miserably without it:
I doubt it.'

'I have known several men and women
Replete with the stuff
Who died quite miserably enough.'

Wright is sometime classed with Wendy Cope as a light verse writer; if light means technically nimble, he is. He has a wonderful sense of timing and knows that, in verse, beating about the bush can be the best route. In the new poems in his latest book, effectively a Collected Poems, Hoping it Might be So: Poems 1974 - 2000 (2000), a threat from a thug in a bar produces the following reaction: 'I want to believe that in London I might have essayed / A quarter attempt at the ghost of a half intervention'.

Actual songs often figure in his poems - blues, country and western. 'The Orbison Consolation' has fun with Orbison's song 'Only the Lonely':

'Only the lonely
Know the way you feel tonight?
Surely the poorly
Have some insight?'

Kit Wright is perhaps better know as a poet for children: his facility with rhyme and quirky humour make him a natural and books like Hot Dog and Other Poems (1982) and Cat Among the Pigeons (1987) are classics. The zany absurdity of his subject matter is heightened by the timing of his verse. 'The Great Detective' applies a sleuth's deductive powers to the mundane:

'Last night I came home. As I entered,
I straight away lighted upon
The fact that the telly was off from the way
I could see it wasn't on!'

Sometimes he piles wordplay on wordplay to hilarious effect. In the poem 'Watch Out, Walter Wall!', Walter Wall is the name of a carpet warehouse intent on expansion:

'The Council said, "Go right ahead.
Don't falter, Walter Wall!
It's alteration stations, Walter.
Sideways, build a tall
Extension, that will form an extra
Wall to WALTER WALL."'

Peter Forbes, 2002

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Leviathan c/o Drake International Services Market House, Market Place Dedington, Banbury, Oxfordshire  OX15 OSE England Tel: +44 (0) 1869 338240 Fax: +44 (0) 1869 338310 E-mail: leviathan@drakeint.co.uk

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