News and Notes

John Lucas • Deryn Rees-Jones writes: I first met John Lucas at the home of our mutual friend, the poet Matt Simpson, in 1995. Tall, elegant, bearded, he could be gruff in demeanour, at first, perhaps to hide his intrinsic modesty and shyness. Yet there was always laughter in the air around him, coupled with a sense of a robustness that went hand in hand with a great capacity for tenderness.

John shared with Matt an unalterable capacity for generosity. He loved literature and those who wrote it, and his commitment to the idea of friendship was a way of being in the world. John’s accomplishments were many: his books of poems sat alongside a huge range of literary scholarship. He was a scholar of Dickens, John Clare, Arnold Bennett and Nancy Cunard, and an expert on the poets of the 1930s. Latterly his novels – realist, always smart, moving and insightful – would arrive with baffling regularity, as if they had been dashed off in an idle moment. His recent book on the history of whistling was a nugget of humour, curiosity and intellect.

In 1994 John established Shoestring Press. His ability to edit scrupulously and his commitment to lifting up the work of the unfashionable, marginalised or neglected writer saw him developing a huge backlist of fine writing, with a Graeco-Australian flavour that reflected the many summers spent on the Greek island of Aegina.

John didn’t do email. He took phone calls after 12 o’clock. He wrote long and funny letters, typed and annotated ...