12 Facts About Geoffrey Grigson

Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson was a British poet, writer, editor, critic, exhibition curator, anthologist and naturalist.

Geoffrey Grigson was born at the vicarage in Pelynt, a village near Looe in Cornwall.

Geoffrey Grigson was educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, and at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Geoffrey Grigson first came to prominence in the 1930s as a poet, then as editor from 1933 to 1939 of the influential poetry magazine New Verse.

In 1946, Geoffrey Grigson was one of the founders of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, together with Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, Peter Watson and Peter Gregory.

In 1951, Geoffrey Grigson curated an exhibition of drawings and watercolours drawn from the British Council Collection, which for three decades toured worldwide to 57 art galleries and museums.

Geoffrey Grigson published 13 collections of poetry, and wrote on travel, on art, on the English countryside, and on botany, among other subjects.

Geoffrey Grigson was the castaway featured in an edition of Roy Plomley's Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on 16 October 1982.

Geoffrey Grigson died in 1985 in Broad Town, Wiltshire, and is buried there in Christ Church churchyard.

Geoffrey Grigson's surviving brother, Wilfrid Geoffrey Grigson, was killed in an air crash in 1948 while serving as a post-Partition official in Pakistan.

Geoffrey Grigson was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for his 1971 volume of poetry Discoveries of Bones and Stones.

The exhibition title was "borrowed from the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson's 1949 collection of essays Places of the Mind", and, in doing so, "acknowledges how every landscape drawing is a construct of the mind and imagination of its creator".