author
Edward Shanks
1892–1953
Remembered as a World War I poet and later as a critic, journalist, and novelist, he moved easily between verse, essays, biography, and even early science fiction. His work carries the energy of a writer who was curious about both literature and the changing modern world.
3 Audiobooks
Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work
by C. Creighton Mandell, Edward Shanks
Poems
by Edward Shanks
About the author
Born in London in 1892, Edward Richard Buxton Shanks was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history and edited Granta. He served with the British Army in France during World War I, and his early reputation grew from poetry shaped by that wartime experience.
Shanks went on to build a varied literary career as a poet, novelist, journalist, academic, literary critic, and biographer. He is especially noted for moving across genres with ease, from criticism and biography to fiction, including works now associated with early science fiction.
His 1919 collection The Queen of China and Other Poems won the first Hawthornden Prize, an early sign of the respect he earned in British literary circles. He died in 1953, leaving behind a body of work that shows both breadth and intelligence, and that still interests readers of war poetry, criticism, and imaginative fiction.