Robert Nye

Robert Nye is an English writer, playwright and poet.Nye started writing stories for children to entertain his three young sons. Nye published his first adult novel, Doubtfire, in 1967. Nye's next publication after Doubtfire was a return to children's literature, a freewheeling version of Beowulf which has remained in print in many editions since 1968. In 1970, he published another children's book, Wishing Gold, and received the James Kennaway Memorial Award for his collection of short stories, Tales I Told My Mother (1969).During the early 1970s Nye wrote several plays for BBC radio including “A Bloody Stupit Hole” (1970), “Reynolds, Reynolds” (1971), and a version of Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist (1971). He was also commissioned by Covent Garden to write an unpublished libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera, Kronia (1970). Nye held the position of writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh, 1976-1977, during which time he received the Guardian fiction prize, followed by the 1976 Hawthornden Prize for his novel Falstaff.He has continued to write poetry, publishing Darker Ends (1969) and Divisions on a Ground (1976), and to prepare editions of other poets with whose work he feels an affinity: Sir Walter Ralegh, William Barnes, and Laura Riding. His own Collected Poems appeared in 1995, and remains in print. His selected poems, entitled The Rain and The Glass, published in 2005, won the Cholmondeley Award. He has lived since 1977 in County Cork, Ireland. Although his novels have won prizes and been translated into many languages, it is as a poet that he would probably prefer to be remembered. The critic Gabriel Josipovici has described him as "one of the most interesting poets writing today, with a voice unlike that of any of his contemporaries."