Francis Adams

Born in Malta in 1862, Francis William Lauderdale Adams was a British poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist, and journalist. He came from a literary and intellectual family: his father, Andrew Leith Adams, was a scientist and army surgeon, and his mother, Bertha Jane Adams, was a novelist.

Much of his reputation rests on the intensity and range of what he produced in a very short life. After moving to Australia in the 1880s for his health, he became closely involved with radical political and literary circles, writing with a strongly anti-capitalist and republican spirit. That Australian period is often seen as an important part of his identity as a writer, linking him to both British fin-de-siècle culture and the development of a more radical Australian nationalism.

Adams returned to England in 1890 and died in 1893, still only 30 years old. Even with such a brief career, he left behind a strikingly varied body of work and is remembered as a vivid, unconventional voice of the 1880s and 1890s.