Rodney Pybus Archive

Includes the literary papers of Rodney Pybus relating to his publications, draft poetry notebooks, papers relating to translations of Lautremont and Catullus; drafts and research materials for Pybus's reviews and articles on contemporary poetry and fiction; papers and correspondence relating to the business and financial affairs of Stand magazine and correspondence, including extenstive correspondence with publishers and with Stand's founding editor Jon Silkin. Also includes posters, journals and newspaper cuttings

Rodney Pybus was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1938. He was educated at Rossall School, Lancashire, before going on to study Classics and English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA 1960; MA 1965).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Pybus worked in the north-east of England as a newspaper journalist, and television writer/producer for Tyne Tees Television, specialising in documentary films, and arts and education programmes. He was a lecturer in Mass Communication in the School of English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia from 1976 to 1979. On returning to the UK, he became literature officer for the Northern Arts Association in Cumbria and the Lake District from 1979 to 1982. During this time he also became a freelance writer. He moved to Sudbury, Suffolk in 1983.

Rodney Pybus first started to publish his poetry in magazines in the late 1960s. His first full poetry collection, In Memoriam Milena, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1973, and won the Poetry Society's Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize. He has subsequently published a number of other poetry collections, including the Northern House pamphlet At the Stone Junction (1978), and has appeared in numerous anthologies.

Pybus first became involved with Jon Silkin's literary magazine, Stand, in the mid-1960s, following its move from Leeds to Newcastle. He has been a regular contributor of reviews of fiction and poetry, as well as his own poetry, since this time. He co-edited the magazine alongside Jon Silkin and Lorna Tracy from 1991 until Silkin's death in 1997, and was also secretary to the Stand Magazine Support Trust. He continues to be associated with the magazine.

Rodney Pybus has held various fellowships and residencies during his career, including an Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowship at Great Connard Upper School (1982-1984), an Arts Council Residency at Parkside Community College and Homerton Teacher's College, Cambridge (1985), Eastern Arts Council Residencies at Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge (1989 and 1990), and a Scottish Arts Council Writer in Schools Residency in 1990. He has given public readings of his poetry widely in the UK and overseas.

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