Professor Malcolm Bradbury

Academic, novelist, screenwriter and playwright Malcolm Bradbury was born in Sheffield on 7 September 1932 and educated at West Bridgford Grammar School in Nottingham, the University of Leicester and Queen Mary's College in London. In 1959 he began a Ph.D. in American Studies at Manchester University, published his first novel, Eating People is Wrong, and began a distinguished academic career at teaching at Hull University. He taught English at the University of Birmingham in the early 1960s and began lecturing at the University of East Anglia in 1965 on English and American studies, setting up the acclaimed creative writing course with Sir Angus Wilson which has produced many eminent contemporary writers, including Booker Prize for Fiction winners Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Malcolm Bradbury was made Professor of American Studies in 1970, Emeritus Professor in 1995.Malcolm Bradbury was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, literary criticism and television plays and series. His most famous novels satirised university life, including The History Man (1975), winner of the Heinemann Award and adapted for television starring Anthony Sher as the Marxist lecturer Howard Kirk. Malcolm Bradbury was Chairman of Judges for the 1981 Booker Prize for Fiction, and his fourth novel, Rates of Exchange was shortlisted for the prize in 1983. His most recent novel To the Hermitage was published in 2000 and was considered by many critics to be his best work of fiction.Malcolm Bradbury lectured throughout the world and his books have been translated into many languages. He wrote many original radio and television plays, and adapted several novels for television including Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His critical work includes The Modern British Novel (1994) and The Modern American Novel (1984). Malcolm Bradbury was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and was awarded a CBE in the 1991. He married Elizabeth Salt in 1959, with whom he had two sons, and lived in Norwich until his sudden death on 27 November 2000.