David Kennedy (1959-2017)

David Kennedy was a poet and editor and a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Hull. He was born in Leicester in 1959, and had a degree in English and European Literature from the University of Warwick. His PhD, from the University of Sheffield, was for research into ideas of community and nation in the poetry of Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney. David worked for over a decade as a purchasing manager in manufacturing industry before becoming a full-time writer.

He was co-editor of the best-selling Bloodaxe anthology of British & Irish poetry of the 1980s and 1990s The New Poetry (1993) and was the author of the critical book New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-1994 (1996). David was a regular reviewer for magazines such as Poetry Review, PN Review and Stand. He published three collections of poetry with Salt, most recently The Devil’s Bookshop (2007) and he published a book-length sequence about Cézanne entitled The Apple and the Mountain with Shearsman Books. His critical books include The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Ashgate 2012) and the co-authored study Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970-2010: Body, Time and Locale (Liverpool University Press, 2013).

David was the author of the RLF’s essay writing guide.