17 Facts About Adrian Mitchell

Adrian Mitchell FRSL was an English poet, novelist, and playwright.

Adrian Mitchell was born on 24 October 1932 near Hampstead Heath, north London.

Adrian Mitchell's mother, Kathleen Fabian, was a Frobel-trained nursery school teacher and his father, Jock Mitchell, a research chemist from Cupar in Fife.

Adrian Mitchell was educated at the Junior School of Monkton Combe School in Bath.

Adrian Mitchell then went to Greenways School, at Ashton Gifford House in Wiltshire, run at the time by a friend of his mother.

Adrian Mitchell's schooling was completed as a boarder at Dauntsey's School, where he collaborated in plays with friend Gordon Snell.

Adrian Mitchell went on to study English at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was taught by JR R Tolkien's son.

Adrian Mitchell became chairman of the university's poetry society and the literary editor of Isis magazine.

Adrian Mitchell first read it to thousands of nuclear disarmament protesters who, having marched through central London on CND's first new format one-day Easter March, finally crammed into Trafalgar Square on the afternoon of Easter Day 1964.

Adrian Mitchell was later responsible for the well-respected musical stage adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a production commissioned and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company that premiered in November 1998 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and transferring to the Barbican Theatre in London.

Adrian Mitchell was for some years poetry editor of the New Statesman, and was the first to publish an interview with the Beatles.

Adrian Mitchell died on 20 December 2008 at the age of 76 in a North London hospital, following a suspected heart attack.

Adrian Mitchell did this through his poetry, his plays, his song lyrics and his own performances.

Adrian Mitchell has sung, chanted, whispered and shouted his poems in every kind of place imaginable, urging us to love our lives, love our minds and bodies and to fight against tyranny, oppression and exploitation.

The Times said that Adrian Mitchell's had been a "forthright voice often laced with tenderness".

Adrian Mitchell first married Maureen Bush, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.

Adrian Mitchell was survived by his second wife, actress Celia Hewitt, whose bookshop, Ripping Yarns, was in Highgate, and their two daughters Sasha and Beattie.