BIOGRAPHY

THOM GUNN

Thomson William Gunn was an Anglo-American poet who became well-known for his dynamic and original verse. He was born in Kent in 1929. Son of two journalists, Gunn experienced a very traumatic childhood. Following the divorce of his parents, he was forced to move around with his father, where he attended multiple schools throughout his youth. Five years after the divorce, when Gunn was 15 years old, his mother committed suicide. He claimed in an interview for the Paris Review that "I was devastated for about four years... so maybe I wrote as a way of getting out of that, but I can't tell". It was during these teenage years, that Gunn discovered his love for poetry and began writing his own verses.

He attended Trinity College in Cambridge, where he studied English literature and became associated with "The Movement". They were a group of poets who were known for rejecting romanticism and emphasizing a more straightforward writing style. After graduating, he went on to publish his first book of poetry, Fighting Terms (1954), which showcased imagery and explored love, desire and morality.

After his first collection, Gunn relocated to San Francisco with his partner Michael Kitay, where he lived out the remainder of his life.  There he truly started reading poetry that would eventually shape his own writings and he eventually became part of the emerging literary scene.  In 1980, Gunn experienced loss and suffering as a result of the AIDS epidemic, which had an impact on the LGBTQIA+ community, and he wrote about this grief it in "The Man with the Night Sweats (1992), the collection in which "The Hug" is part in. Throughuut his life, he continued to explore and address addiction, nature and sexuality through his works. 

Thom Gunn attends an event, UK, 25th June 1970. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty images)

From 1958 through 1999, he worked as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In his life, he received many honors and awards, like the the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Levinson Prize, the W.H. Smith Award, the Sara Teasdale Prize, the Forward Prize, the Rockefeller Award and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award.

In 2004, at 74 years old, Thom Gunn passed away from heart failure in the comfort of his home. 

Gunn's life and work were shaped by his experience in both countries, and he became a prominent figure in both the English and American poetry scenes. His life and work were marked by the special talent for bridging the gap between British and American poetic traditions. His poetry captures the lively energy of San Francisco, his chosen home, as well as the influences of his British ancestry. Gunn's contributions to modern poetry are still praised for their intensity of feeling, formal rigor, and courageous examination of the human condition.