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Fuller, Roy Broadbent (1912–1991), poet, was born at Failsworth, Lancashire, on 11 February 1912, the eldest son of Leopold Charles Fuller (1884–1920), assistant works manager at a rubber-proofing mill, and Nellie, née Broadbent (1888–1949), the daughter of a workhouse master's clerk. They were married in 1910. Roy's father died after an operation for bowel cancer on 18 December 1920, and shortly thereafter his widow and family began a life of living in rented accommodation. Roy attended Blackpool high school from 1923 to 1928 and on leaving school was articled to a firm of solicitors, T. and F. Wylie Kay. He was admitted as a solicitor in 1934. On 25 June 1936 he married Kathleen (Kate) Smith (1913–1993), a journalist with the West Lancashire Evening Gazette. They moved to Kennington near Ashford in Kent, where for three years he was with Flower and Pain, solicitors. Their only son, John Leopold Fuller, himself to become a distinguished poet, was born on new year's day 1937. In December 1938 they moved to Blackheath, when Fuller joined the Woolwich Equitable Building Society as assistant solicitor.

Fuller first came to public attention as a poet through publication in Twentieth Century Verse, edited by Julian Symons, himself later famous as poet, novelist, and critic, and a lifelong friend of Fuller. Symons initiated the series of Fortune Poets in which Fuller's first book, Poems (1939), appeared. Fuller's early poetry was marked by the influence of the work of W. H. Auden and (via the poetry of Norman Cameron) of Robert Graves.

With the outbreak of the Second World War Fuller was inducted into the Royal Navy in April 1941. After a course in radar, in April 1942 he left for Africa where he was promoted to petty officer in 1943. The experience of Africa in the context of the savagery of the Second World War deepened Fuller's poetry and brought to the fore that sense of incipient chaos lurking in so much of it. During the war John Lehmann, an enduring friend of Fuller, encouraged his work by publication in New Writing and Daylight and Penguin New Writing, and by bringing out his second and third books, The Middle of a War (1942) and The Lost Season (1944), from the Hogarth Press. These books established Fuller as a poet of importance.

Fuller returned to England in 1943 to serve as a lieutenant at the Admiralty in London. On demobilization in December 1945, he returned to the Woolwich, where he remained until his retirement. The end of the Second World War brought a challenging cultural situation for Fuller, whose strongly political orientations, with a decided sympathy for communism, seemed increasingly anachronistic. His immediate post-war collections, Epitaphs and Occasions (1949) and Counterparts (1954), do not have the power of his wartime work, though his extensive reviews and broadcasts of those years contributed to a cultural ambience favourable to the Movement of the 1950s. Many of those often controversial reviews were for The Listener, edited by his friend J. R. Ackerley, to whom Counterpoints was dedicated. It was not until the publication of Brutus's Orchard in 1958 that Fuller found a new and abiding poetic voice. There followed a series of volumes—New Poems (1968), Tiny Tears (1973), and From the Joke Shop (1975), in which Fuller experimented with syllabic verse and wrote with great naturalness and fluency in a manner that was to be characteristic of him—urbane and ironic, tentative yet exploratory.

While Fuller's reputation is based on his poetry, in mid-career he published several novels. He began with crime fiction: With my Little Eye (1946), The Second Curtain (1953), and Fantasy and Fugue (1954), brought together in 1988 as Crime Omnibus. These led to his writing Image of a Society (1956), which reflected his experience at the Woolwich; this was followed by The Ruined Boys (1959), The Father's Comedy (1961), The Perfect Fool (1961), My Child, my Sister (1965), considered by many his best, The Carnal Island (1970), and Stares (1990). These books did not initially receive the appreciation they deserve even if they do not represent the foundation of Fuller's fame. Running through them was the theme of the relation of art to life, not inappropriate to an author who had so strong a worldly career. In 1958 he became the solicitor for the Woolwich and was a director from 1969 to 1987, and served as vice-president of the Building Societies Association from 1969 to 1987.

Fuller was elected professor of poetry at Oxford University for the period 1968 to 1973. His lectures, with their careful and sensitive exploration of the craft of poetry, were published as Owls and Artificers (1971) and Professors and Gods (1974). He was created a CBE in 1970. He served as a governor of the BBC from 1972 to 1979 and from 1976 to 1977 as a member of the Arts Council, where he was chairman of the literature panel. He resigned over what he felt was the profligate distribution of public funds. He was also a member of the Library Advisory Council for England from 1977 to 1979. Awards he received included the Duff Cooper memorial prize in 1968, the queen's gold medal for poetry in 1970, the Cholmondeley award of the Society of Authors in 1980, and an honorary doctorate of literature at the University of Kent in 1986.

Handsome, moustached, with a full head of curly hair, in his later years he was said jokingly to resemble a retired major-general in appearance. His first three volumes of memoirs, Souvenirs (1980), Vamp till Ready (1982), and Home and Dry (1984), covering his life up to the end of the Second World War, aimed to produce an account that would not seem to be dominated by an imposed pattern. The result appeared desultory to some—including his publishers, who advised against publication. This led to changes of publisher that were ultimately less than fortunate, and he was left with problems in finding an outlet for his poetry, as he explains in his final volume of memoirs, Spanner and Pen (1991). The experience was extremely disturbing to him—particularly as the work that he sought to get published was his masterpiece, Available for Dreams (1989) which jointly won the W. H. Heinemann award.

Available for Dreams is perhaps his finest work, in which the tightly contained decency and composure that mark all his poetry come together with the unease concerning the whole enterprise of civilization that lurked behind his wartime poems. These pressures emerge movingly in a domestic ambience, often of his garden at Blackheath, through the awareness that his own life, and the lives of those close to him, are coming to an end.

In 1990 Fuller was operated on for prostate cancer and again shortly afterwards to retard the spread of the cancer in his bones. After a brief return to activity, he was confined to his home at 37 Langton Way, Blackheath, London, where he died on 27 September 1991. His body was cremated at Eltham crematorium, without benefit of clergy, as he had wished. A widely attended memorial event was held as part of the 1992 Greenwich Festival.

Fuller was described by the poet Gavin Ewart as ‘one of the finest British poets of this century’ (quoted on the dust jacket of Available for Dreams), and this is likely to remain an accepted verdict on his achievement.

A. T. Tolley from The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography