Derek Stanford (writer)

Derek Stanford FRSL (11 October 1918 – 19 December 2008) was a British writer, known as a biographer, essayist and poet.

Educated at Upper Latymer School, Hammersmith, London, he was a conscientious objector during World War II, serving in the Non-Combatant Corps.^[1] He edited Resistance, a poetry magazine of just one issue, with David West in 1946.

For a period in the early 1950s he worked with Muriel Spark on several books, and was a supporter of hers (together with the eccentric poet Hugo Manning, a long-time friend), in the Poetry Society.^[2] Stanford described Spark's ousting in Inside the Forties.

Spark convinced him of the talent of Dylan Thomas,^[3] and Stanford wrote an early book on Thomas shortly after his death. He is associated with the character Hector Bartlett in Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington (1988).^[4]

Stanford died in 2008, aged 90, in Brighton. His widow is the poet Julie Whitby.