Robert Gavin Hampson

Robert Gavin Hampson (born 1948) is a British poet and academic. Hampson was born and raised in Liverpool, before studying in London and Toronto and finally settling in London. Hampson has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, since 1973, and has been a Professor of Modern Literature there since 2000.

Robert Gavin Hampson was born in Liverpool in 1948. He studied English Literature at King's College London and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete a master's degree at University of Toronto. He then returned to King's College, London, where he completed a PhD on Joseph Conrad.

During the 1970s he co-edited the poetry magazine Alembic with Peter Barry and Ken Edwards and was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. His work as one of the editors of Alembic has received attention in two books by Wolfgang Gortschacher - Little Magazine Profiles: The Little Magazines in Great Britain, 1939-1993 (University of Salzburg, 1993) and Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (Poetry Salzburg, 2000)- and, more recently, in an interview (with Ken Edwards) by Sophie Seita in the magazine mimeo mimeo (2014). His best-known work is probably Seaport, which has been written about by Peter Barry, Andrew Duncan, Amy Cutler, Neal Alexander and others. His poetry has been translated into German, Italian and Rumanian. See, for example, Wolfgang Gortschacher & Ludwig Laher, So Also Ist Das: Eine Zweisprachige Anthologie Britischer Gegenswartslyrik (Haymon-Verlag, 2002), and the translation of the sequence 'Lou Mistrau' in the Italian journal 'Soglie' (August 2014).. In 2012, his collection 'Reworked Disasters was long-listed for the Forward Prize. His more recent work includes 'love's damage', which was published in the Surrey Poetry Festival Magazine (21.05.11), edited by Amy De'Ath and Jonty Tiplady <<static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/436447/12796874>>; 'sonnets 4 sophie' first published in Veer Vier (September 2013)<<epc.buffalo.edu/library/Veer-56-1014.pdf>>, while 'an explanation of colours' was reviewed by Edmund Hardy and Melissa Flores-Borquez in Intercapillary Space <<http://intercapillaryspace. blogspot.co.uk>> and 'out of sight' (crater, 2012)and 'Liverpool (hugs &) kisses', his 2014 collaboration with Robert Sheppard, are reviewed on the other room website. <<http://otherroom.org/tag/roberthampson>>

During his time as Head of the Department of English, he founded the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, with Redell Olsen in 2002 and the MA in Creative Writing with Andrew Motion in 2003. Graduates of the Creative Writing programme include the novelists Tahmima Anam, Anna Whitwham and Sarah Perry and the poets Sam Riviere, Robert Selby and Declan Ryan. Graduates of the Poetic Practice programme include Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Prudence Chamberlain, Becky Cremin, Frances Kruk, Ryan Ormonde, Jooyeon Park, Nisha Ramayya, Sophie Robinson, Karen Sandhu and Steven Willey.

In 1999, he was asked to take over the TALKS series that Bob Perelman had established at King's College, London, during his year as a visiting professor there. Hilda Bronstein has given an account of the early years of the London TALKS series in How2 <<www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal]]>> He subsequently set up the Runnymede International Literary Festival in collaboration with Royal Holloway and Runnymede Borough Council. He has continued to be the Festival Director. More recently, the Festival transferred some of it activities to Central London as 'Runnymede in London' through collaboration with the Centre for Creative Collaboration (c4cc) <<https://audioboom.com/boos/143889-c4cc-launch/>>, which also provided the venue for Polyply, the event series run by Redell Olsen, Will Montgomery and Kristen Kreider. <<https://polyply.wordpress.com/>> In 2010-11, he collaborated with the Palestinian visual artist, Leena Nammari, on an concertina book, 'The Long View', as part of the Beyond Text project.<<http://www.poetrybeyond text.org/hampson-namari>> During 2014, he curated an event series, Amid the Ruins, with Carrie Foulkes at the Daniel Blau Gallery, Hoxton Square, London.<<http://otherroom.org/tag/roberthampson>>

He has also pursued a parallel career as a Conrad scholar and editor with three monographs on Joseph Conrad: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992), Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (2000) and Conrad's Secrets (2013). Conrad's Secrets received the first-place prize for the Adam Gillon Award (2015) from the <<Joseph Conrad Society of America>> for the best recent work on Joseph Conrad <<josephconrad.org/News/news.html>>. He was editor of The Conradian (1989–96) and edited various Conrad texts - Lord Jim (1986), Victory (1989), Heart of Darkness (1995) - for Penguin books, as well as Rudyard Kipling's Something of Myself (1987) and Soldiers Three (1993) and Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (2000). He was elected Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society(UK) in 2015<<www.josephconradsociety.org/>>.

He and his colleague Andrew Gibson also make an appearance (lightly disguised) in Adam Roberts's 2003 science-fiction novel, 'Polystom. <<http://www.adamroberts.com/writing/polystom>>

Poetry

• Degrees of Addiction (London: Share, 1975).
• How Nell Scored (London: Poet & Peasant, 1976).
• A Necessary Displacement (Orpington: Pushtika, 1978).
• A Feast of Friends (Durham: Pig Press, 1982).
• A City at War (London: Northern Lights, 1985).
• (with David Miller) Nevsky Prospekt (Dublin: hardPressed poetry, 1988).
• A human measure (Dublin: hardPressed poetry, 1989).
• Unicorns: 7 Studies in Velocity (London: Pushtika, 1989).
• (with Gerlinde Roder-Bolton) Dingo (London: Pushtika Press, 1994).
• Seaport: interim edition (Woking: Pushtika Press, 1995)..
• (with Gerlinde Roder-Bolton), higher densities: a new hampshire sampler (Woking: Pushtika Press, 1996).
• C for Security (Woking: Pushtika Press, 2001).
• Pentimento (Pushtika Press, 2005).
• out of sight (Crater Press, 2012.)
• Assembled fugitives: selected poems, 1973-1998 (Exeter: Stride Press, 2001).
• Seaport (Shearsman, 2008).
• an explanation of colours (Veer Books, 2010).
• (with Leena Nammari) The Long View (2011).
• Reworked Disasters (ksf,2012).
• (with Robert Sheppard) Liverpool (Hugs &) Kisses (ship of fools / pushtika, 2015).

'Critical Work

• Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992).

'*'Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (Palgrave, 2000).

'*'Conrad's Secrets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

• (Co-edited with Katherine Isobel Baxter), Conrad and Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
• (Co-edited with Tony Davenport), Ford Madox Ford: A Re-Appraisal (Rodopi, 2002).
• (Co-edited with Max Saunders), Ford Madox Ford's Modernity (Rodopi, 2003).
• (Co-edited with Peter Barry), New British poetries: The scope of the possible (Manchester University Press, 1993).
• (Co-edited with Will Montgomery), Frank O'Hara Now (Liverpool University Press, 2010).
• (Co-edited with Ken Edwards), Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (Shearsman, 2016).