Tony Lopez (poet)


Tony Lopez is an English poet who first began to be published in the 1970s. His writing was at once recognised for its attention to language, and for his ability to compose a coherent book, rather than a number of poems accidentally printed together. He is best known for his book False Memory, first published in the United States and much anthologised.

Life

Lopez grew up in Brixton, South London, and was educated at local state schools including Henry Thornton Grammar School. He worked as a freelance writer of fiction, publishing five crime and science fiction novels with New English Library between 1973 and 1976, before going to the University of Essex, and then taking up a research studentship at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, where J. H. Prynne supervised his PhD on the Scottish poet W. S. Graham.
He taught briefly at the University of Leicester and the University of Edinburgh, and then for twenty years at the University of Plymouth, where he was appointed the first Professor of Poetry in 2000 and Emeritus Professor in 2009. He has received awards from the Wingate Foundation, the Society of Authors, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council, England.
His poetry is featured in The Art of the Sonnet, Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems, The Reality Book of Sonnets, and Conductors of Chaos. His critical writings are collected in Meaning Performance: Essays on Poetry and The Poetry of W. S. Graham.
Lopez is married with two grown-up children and lives in Exmouth in Devon.