Sydney Graham was born and brought up in Greenock, and trained as an engineer. In 1943 he settled in Cornwall, where the growing colony of experimental artists came to respect the determination and acute self-criticism with which he pursued his work. Artists Sven Berlin, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Michael Seward Snow, Karl Weschke and Bryan Wynter were among many friends who shared their landscape with him. In 1949 T.S. Eliot adopted his work and Faber and Faber published all his subsequent poetry. Since his death in 1986, the importance of Graham’s achievement has been widely acknowledged. Key posthumous works are New Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2004) and The Nightfisherman – Selected Letters of W.S. Graham (Carcanet Press, 1999). Links to both publishers can be found on our links page.
