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Brownjohn, Alan

Entry updated 4 March 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1931-2024) UK poet, politician, teacher, man-of-letters and author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Contest in Crime" in Young Winter's Tales 2 (anth 1971) edited by M R Hodgkin; he also wrote as by John Berrington. His poetry – and relatively infrequent fiction – was irradiated by a wry, compassionate, occasionally bitter socialist perspective on the course of British history; in this he was like and unlike Philip Larkin (1922-1985), as extensively demonstrated in a sympathetic study, Philip Larkin (1975 chap). His early work was conveniently assembled as Collected Poems 1952-83 (coll 1983), which includes some poetry with fantasy elements; of his later work, Ludbrooke & Others (coll 2010) stands out for its portrait of a twenty-first century Britain challenged by change; again, surreal ventures into fantasy occasionally sharpen the picture.

Brownjohn's first novel of sf interest – published in the ebb years of Thatcherism – is The Way You Tell Them: A Yarn of the Nineties (1990), in which Britain, as the millennium approaches, slips slowly into a Dystopian state whose rulers have learned well how to subvert and co-opt those who still retain their integrity, political or artistic. The much later Satire Enjoyment: A Comedy (2016), set in a Near Future very much like a labile present tense of tomorrow, takes place in a London heavily surveyed by the drones of the Police Protection of Pleasure agency at a time punctuated by periodic "Great Years", whose effects can be – as in the twenty-first century in general – simultaneously cosmetic and transformative. [JC]

Alan Charles Brownjohn

born London: 28 July 1931

died 23 February 2024

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