Anthony Simon Thwaite OBE (23 June 1930 – 22 April 2021)[1] was an English poet and critic, widely known as the editor of his friend Philip Larkin's collected poems and letters.
Born in Chester, England, to Yorkshire parents, Thwaite at the age of 10 crossed the Atlantic alone to spend the war years in and around Washington D.C., with an aunt and uncle.
While still an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, he published a pamphlet with the Fantasy Press in a series that included the early work of Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jennings.
In 1955, they went by ship to teach in Japan for two years, where their first child was born and Thwaite's first book of poems was published, a tribute from his postgraduate students at the University of Tokyo.
A brief return to the BBC in 1967 ended when Thwaite was invited to be Literary Editor of the New Statesman, where his assistants were successively Claire Tomalin and James Fenton.
He edited selections (Longfellow, R. S. Thomas, Skelton), and anthologies, including Six Centuries of Verse, based on the Thames Television/Channel Four 16-part series with his narration spoken by the actor John Gielgud.
At the launch of his last (20th) book of poems, when he was 85, the distinguished audience (including Alan Hollinghurst, David Lodge, P. J. Kavanagh and Penelope Lively) gave some indication of the esteem in which he is held by his fellow writers.
He writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things....the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present - and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this."