William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) was born and brought up in Greenock, Scotland, and trained as an engineer. He eventually settled in Cornwall, where a 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, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter were among many friends who shared their landscape with him. In 1948 T.S. Eliot asked Graham to join the Faber and Faber poetry list, and the company have remained his primary publisher. Since his death, 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.

W. S. Graham's books

Approaches To How They Behave
The Caught Habits of Language