Alan Charles Brownjohn FRSL (28 July 1931 – 23 February 2024) was an English poet and novelist.
[2] In 1960 he married the writer Shirley Toulson[3] and in 1962 both were elected as Labour councillors in the Wandsworth Metropolitan Borough Council,[4] and Brownjohn stood as the Labour Party candidate for Richmond (Surrey) in the 1964 general election, polling in second place.
[4] 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.
[6] 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.