Edward Upward

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Edward Upward bigraphy, stories - British writer

Edward Upward : biography

9 September 1903 – 13 February 2009

Edward Falaise Upward (9 September 1903 – 13 February 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who, prior to his death, was believed to be the UK’s oldest living author.

Biography

Upward was educated at Repton School, where he became a friend of Christopher Isherwood. As an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he won the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse in 1924. He was part of a group of writers including Isherwood (with whom he created the surreal world of the Mortmere stories), W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.

After graduation Upward worked in various teaching jobs, and in 1932 took up a post at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, where he was to remain for nearly thirty years. He joined the Communist Party that year and remained committed to internationalism and socialism, although he and his wife Hilda left the Communist Party in 1948, believing its policies in Britain were no longer revolutionary.

Upward’s first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1938. It describes in poetic prose the rebellion of a private tutor against his employer and the menacing world of the 1930s, moving from a nightmarish state to one where he recognizes that he must join the workers’ movement.

A semi-autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent, was published in the 1960s and 1970s after he had retired from teaching and moved to Sandown, Isle of Wight. It deals with a poet’s life and his struggle to combine artistic creativity with political commitment, including in its historical sweep the fight against the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, opposition to the leadership of the Communist Party in the 1940s and later involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

In the last decades of the twentieth century Upward returned to writing short stories, which were published, along with earlier works, by Enitharmon Press. In 2005, Upward was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded their Benson Medal.

He died aged 105 on 13 February 2009 in Pontefract, England.