Selected Poems

P.J. Kavanagh was born in England in 1931, and worked as a lecturer, actor and broadcaster, as well as a writer. His Collected Poems were published in 1992, the year in which he was given the Cholmondeley Award for poetry. His memoir The Perfect Stranger won the Richard Hillary Prize in 1966, and his first novel A Song and Dance was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1968. From 1983 to 1996 P.J. Kavanagh was a columnist on the Spectator, and from 1996 to 2002 on The Times Literary Supplement. In addition to his four novels for adults and two children's novels, he wrote a travel autobiography (Finding Connections), a literary companion (Voices in Ireland) and has edited The Oxford Book of Short Poems and The Essential G.K. Chesterton, and, for Carcanet, a new edition of his Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney.