Reilly 12, #59.

Ian Hamilton, editor, literary critic, biographer and poet, was born in Kings Lynn, Norfolk in 1938. He was educated at Darlington Grammar School and Keble College, Oxford. After leaving university, he formed the influential poetry magazine The Review in 1962, which ran for ten years. Its successor, the large format literary journal The New Review began monthly publication in 1974 and continued until 1979. In the course of its fifty issues it published many new writers -- notably Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James, Jim Crace.

Hamilton's first full-length book of poems, The Visit, was published in 1970 and was the Poetry Book Society's choice for that year. Fifty Poems was published in 1988 and Sixty Poems in 1998.

As a biographer, Hamilton was highly praised for his critical study of Robert Lowell published in 1983. He published In Search of J D Salinger after much controversy and legal wrangling in 1987.

Hamilton also published several important literary studies, including The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors (1976). Writers in Hollywood, 1915-51 (1990), and Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992). Hamilton edited the influential Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (1994) and the series Bloomsbury Classics comprising over 36 selections of English poets.

Over a career spanning more than forty years, Ian Hamilton wrote several hundred articles, reviews and essays and many of his literary journalistic pieces were collected into book form: A Poetry Chronicle (Criticism 1973), Walking Possession (prose essays, 1994), The Trouble with Money (prose essays, 1998).

Ian Hamilton died in 2001. His book of critical essays on twentieth century poets Against Oblivion was published posthumously by Penguin in 2002.

The Collected Poems, introduced by Alan Jenkins (Faber & Faber) will be published in 2009, and Bloomsbury will publish the backlist over the next few years.