David John Murray Wright (1920–1994) was an author and "an acclaimed South African-born poet".¹

Biography

Wright was born in Johannesburg, South Africa 23 February 1920 of normal hearing.

He contracted scarlet fever at age 7, and was deafened as a result of the disease. He emigrated to England at the age of 14, where he was enrolled in the Northampton School for the Deaf. He studied at Oriel College, Oxford, and graduated in 1942.

His first work, a poem entitled Eton Hall, was published in 1942-1943 in the journal Oxford Poetry.²

He became a freelance writer in 1947 after working on The Sunday Times for five years. He co-founded the quarterly literary review X, which he co-edited from 1959-1962. His work includes three books about Portugal written with Patrick Swift, his co-founder and co-editor of X. He penned an autobiography in 1969, and a biography about a fellow South African poet in 1961. He also edited a number of publications throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Wright was not reticent about his deafness, and his autobiography, ‘’Deafness. A Personal Account’’ (1969), is often used to give hearing people an insight into an experience they might not easily imagine.

In 1951, he married Philippa ("Pippa") Reid (d. 1985); and Oonagh Swift in 1987. Wright lived in Braithwaite, just outside Keswick, in the Lake District of England, and became good friends with Norman Nicholson, a fellow poet, and his wife, often visiting each other.

Wright died of cancer in Waldron, East Sussex, 28 August 1994.

Quotes about

• "His poetry was by turns lyrical, satirical and narrative. Sometimes it was fueled by recollections of his homeland, although he was not politically active on South African issues." (New York Times)
• "profuse, fluent, versatile" and "the foremost South African poet of his generation." The Daily Telegraph
• "It is a creative paradox that we owe to a deaf man some of the most striking images of sound in contemporary English poetry." Geoffrey Hill 1980
• "His poetry is remarkable for its quiet intelligence and humour, and the integrity of its style. The tone is conversational, though not in the sense of reproducing a factitious chattiness; rather, it creates the lively curve of an eminently humane mind's thinking and speaking" (T.J.G. Harris, in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, ed. Ian Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 589).

Published works

As poet

• David Wright: Poems and Versions ISBN 0-85635-963-7
• Moral Stories (1954)
• Monologue of a Deaf Man (1958)
• Adam at Evening (1965)
• To the gods the Shades: New and Collected Poems (1976)
• Metrical Observations (1980)
• Selected Poems (1988)
• Elegies (1990).

As author

• Deafness: A Personal Account (1969); Faber & Faber; Revised edition (October 1991) ISBN 0-571-14195-1
• Roy Campbell (1961)

As co-author

Three books about Portugal (David Wright & Patrick Swift).

As editor

• X, A Quarterly Review (Barrie and Rockliff 1959-1962)
• X An anthology selected and with an introduction by Patrick Wright, Oxford University Press (1988)
• Longer Contemporary Poems (1966)
• the Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse (1968) Penguin Books ISBN 0-8446-3215-5
• the Penguin Book Of Everyday Verse (1976); Penguin Books New Ed edition (August 25, 1983) ISBN 0-14-042244-7

References

External links

• Independent Living Institute review
• UK Universities Archives Hub