Alan Charles BrownjohnFRSL (28 July 1931 – 23 February 2024) was an English poet and novelist. He also worked as a teacher, lecturer, critic and broadcaster.

Alan Charles Brownjohn was born inLondon on 28 July 1931. He was educated atMerton College, Oxford.^[1] He taught in schools between 1957 and 1965.^[2]

In 1960 he married the writerShirley Toulson^[3] and in 1962 both were elected as Labour councillors in theWandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council,^[4] and Brownjohn stood as theLabour Party candidate forRichmond (Surrey) in the1964 general election, polling in second place. He and Toulson divorced in 1969.^[4]

Brownjohn was an inspirational English teacher at Beckenham and Penge Boys Grammar School until 1965. He moved to lecture atBattersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until 1979, when he became a full-time writer.^[2] He participated inPhilip Hobsbaum's weekly poetry discussion meetings known asThe Group, which also includedPeter Porter,Martin Bell,Peter Redgrove,George MacBeth andEdward Lucie-Smith.^[5]

Brownjohn was a Patron ofHumanists UK.^[6]

Reviewing Brownjohn'sCollected Poems (Enitharmon Press, 2006),Anthony Thwaite wrote inThe 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."^[7]

Alan Brownjohn died on 23 February 2024, at the age of 92.^[8]

• Travellers Alone (1954), poems
• The Railings (1961), poems
• To Clear the River (1964), novel, as John Berrington
• Penguin Modern Poets 14 (1965), withMichael Hamburger,Charles Tomlinson
• The Lions' Mouths (1967)
• A Day by Indirections (1969), broadsheet poem
• First I Say This: A Selection of Poems for Reading Aloud (1969), editor
• Sandgrains On A Tray (1969)
• Woman Reading Aloud (1969) broadsheet poem
• Synopsis (1970)
• Brownjohn's Beasts (1970)
• Transformation Scene (1971) broadside poem
• An Equivalent (1971) poem
• New Poems 1970-71. A P.E.N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1971), edited withSeamus Heaney andJon Stallworthy
• Warrior's Career (1972)
• She Made of It (1974)
• A Song of Good Life (1975)
• Philip Larkin (1975)
• New Poetry 3, Arts Council anthology (1977), edited withMaureen Duffy
• A Night in the Gazebo (1980)
• Nineteen Poems (1980)
• Collected Poems 1952–1983 (1983)
• The Old Flea-Pit (1987)
• The Observation Car (1990), poems
• The Gregory Anthology 1987–1990 (1990), editor withK. W. Gransden
• The Way You Tell Them: A Yarn of the Nineties (1990), novel
• Inertia Reel (1992), broadside poem
• In the Cruel Arcade (1994)
• The Long Shadows (1997), novel
• Horace by Pierre Corneille (1997), translator
• The Cat without E-mail (Enitharmon Press 2001)
• A Funny Old Year (2001), novel
• The Men Around Her Bed (Enitharmon Press, 2004)
• Windows on the Moon (2009), novel
• Ludbrooke and Others (Enitharmon Press, 2010)
• A Bottle and Other Poems (Enitharmon Press, 2015)
• parrot poem

Wikiquote has quotations related toAlan Brownjohn.

• Alan Brownjohn atBritish Council: Literature
• Alan Brownjohn - Poetry Archive website
• Enitharmon Press website
• "Alan Brownjohn Papers,1940-2011", Penn State University Libraries
• "Overview: Alan Brownjohn", Oxford Reference.
• Alan Brownjohn atIMDb
• Alan Brownjohn discography atDiscogs

• 1931 births
• 2024 deaths
• Writers from London
• Alumni of Merton College, Oxford
• English humanists
• English male poets
• 20th-century English novelists
• 21st-century English novelists
• Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
• English male novelists
• 20th-century English male writers
• 21st-century English male writers

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