Alan Brownjohn

Alan Brownjohn studied at Merton College. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is poetry, prose and literature. Places of work recorded in the authority are England. Distinctions recorded are Cholmondeley Award and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

• Honorific Suffix — FRSL • Pen Name — John Berrington • Birth Name — Alan Charles Brownjohn • Born — 28 July 1931 • Birthplace — London, England • Died — 23 February 2024 • Occupation — Poet and novelist • Education — Merton College, Oxford • Spouse — Shirley Toulson (m. 1960; div. 1969)

Alan Charles Brownjohn was born in London, England, on 28 July 1931. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford. He taught in schools between 1957 and 1965. In 1960 he married the writer Shirley Toulson and in 1962 both were elected as Labour councillors in the Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council, and Brownjohn stood as the Labour Party candidate for Richmond (Surrey) in the 1964 general election, polling in second place. He and Toulson divorced in 1969. Brownjohn was an inspirational English teacher at Beckenham and Penge Boys Grammar School until 1965. He moved to lecture at Battersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until 1979, when he became a full-time writer. He participated in Philip Hobsbaum's weekly poetry discussion meetings known as The Group, which also included Peter Porter, Martin Bell, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth and Edward Lucie-Smith. Brownjohn was a Patron of Humanists UK. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. Reviewing Brownjohn's Collected Poems (Enitharmon Press, 2006), Anthony Thwaite wrote in The Guardian: "...he is a social poet in the sense that if people in the future want to know what many lives were like in the second half of the 20th century, they should read Alan Brownjohn - observant, troubled, humane, scrupulous, wry, funny." Alan Brownjohn died on 23 February 2024, at the age of 92.