author
Ivor Gurney
1890–1937
Remembered as both a poet and a composer, he brought the landscapes of Gloucestershire and the shock of the First World War into work that still feels vivid and personal. His songs and poems carry a rare mix of tenderness, homesickness, and hard-won honesty.
2 Audiobooks
Severn & Somme
by Ivor Gurney
War's Embers, and Other Verses
by Ivor Gurney
About the author
Born in Gloucester in 1890, Ivor Gurney showed musical talent early, singing as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. He became one of the few English writers of his time to be deeply admired in two arts at once: poetry and composition, especially song.
The First World War shaped him profoundly. He served as a soldier on the Western Front, and his wartime experiences fed some of his most powerful poems, where beauty, friendship, fear, and memory sit side by side. Again and again, his writing returned to Gloucestershire, whose fields, roads, and voices remained a source of comfort and identity.
Gurney also lived with severe mental illness, and he spent the last years of his life in psychiatric hospitals before his death in 1937. Even so, his reputation has continued to grow, and he is now recognized as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from the war: a writer and musician whose work joins lyric grace with deep emotional truth.