Diane Suess
Monday 25 November, 2025
About Professor Kenneth Allott
Professor Kenneth Allott (1912-1973) was born in Glamorganshire, and was later brought up on Tyneside. He studied English at Durham, and Oxford, eventually taking up a post at Liverpool in 1948 and becoming the A.C.Bradley Professor of Modern English Literature in 1964. An inspirational teacher, and a well-known and highly-respected poet of the 1930s, Allott published two collections of poetry: Poems (1938) and The Ventriloquist’s Doll (1943) as well as plays, and a book on Jules Verne. Between 1936 and 1939 he was an editor of New Verse. His anthology, English Verse (1950, revised 1962) was a formative book for many later poets. A definitive edition of his Collected Poems was published in 2008.