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Angus Calder

Angus Calder was an author, poet, critic, editor, historian and journalist. He took a degree in English at Cambridge and produced a doctoral thesis, on Second World War politics in Britain, at the University of Sussex. The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945 was published in 1969. It won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewllyn Rhys Prize the following year and has been in print ever since. He became Staff Tutor in Arts with the Open University in Scotland in 1979, retiring early in 1993 with the title Reader in Cultural Studies. In 1981, he published Revolutionary Empire, a survey of the rise of the English-speaking empires from the fifteenth-century to the American War of Independence. His more recent work includes the acclaimed Penguin anthology Wars in and co-editing The Raucle Tongue: Selected Essays, Journalism and Interviews by Hugh MacDiarmid.

Angus Calder taught all over the world, but mostly in Africa, New Zealand and Scotland. He lectured in literature at several African universities and published extensively on nineteenth-century Russian fiction, on African literature, and on English and Scottish literature. He was co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature from 1981 to 1987. He published verse throughout his life, won a Gregory Award in 1967, and brought out his first volume of poems, Waking in Waikato, in 1995. Sun behind the Castle, a collection of Edinburgh poems, was published by Luath Press in 2004. Angus died in 2008.