Norman Nicholson
b. 1914 – d. 1987
Norman Nicholson was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1945.
Norman Nicholson was a poet and dramatist. He is particularly admired for his poetry and topographical writing and is now recognised as a writer who dealt with important environmental and ecological themes.
Norman Nicholson remembered – by Antoinette Fawcett
Nicholson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945, shortly after having been awarded the inaugural Heinemann Award for his first full collection of poetry, Five Rivers (Faber & Faber, 1944). Nicholson was then only 31 years old.
Nicholson’s emphasis on locality and on the interaction of humans with their environment is particularly relevant in our times. His work is accessible and authentic, written in a distinctive voice that is still engaging. Norman Nicholson studies have taken off in recent years, with a doctoral thesis by Dr. David Cooper on ‘Norman Nicholson and the Poetics of Place and Space’ (Lancaster, 2007) and current work at the University of Oxford on Nicholson and Norse Medievalism and at the University of Durham on Nicholson’s Cumbrian Landscape. Nicholson received the Queen’s Medal for Poetry and several honorary degrees in recognition of his outstanding work.
