13 Facts About Ted Walker

Edward Joseph Walker FRSL was a prize-winning English poet, short story writer, travel writer, TV and radio dramatist and broadcaster.

Ted Walker was born in Lancing, West Sussex, the son of a carpenter from Birmingham with family roots in the village of Shrawley in rural Worcestershire who had found work in the south-coast construction industry.

Ted Walker published some work in the early numbers, the beginning of his poetic career.

In 1963 Ted Walker obtained a teaching post in Bognor Regis and from there moved to Chichester High School.

Ted Walker had started to write poetry regularly and of a quality that made it welcome in journals such as The Listener, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Magazine.

The fee which Ted Walker received for his first poem to be published in The New Yorker, "Breakwaters" helped him to move back to his native Sussex.

Ted Walker began broadcasting with BBC local radio and TV.

Big Jim, a series of comedy films set during the postwar building boom, extolled the comradeship which, for Ted Walker, epitomised working-class life "in them far-off days of the Figaro Club before the world turned lax and sour".

For most of his working life Ted Walker earned a living as Professor of Creative Writing at New England College, an American liberal arts academy that had a British campus in West Sussex, while pursuing his writing and other great passion, travel.

Ted Walker was a frequent visitor to Spain, and in 1989 he published an account of his experiences and impressions of the country, In Spain.

In 1987 Lorna Ted Walker died after a long battle against cancer.

The cancer serves as a metaphor for what Ted Walker saw as the unrelenting decay of the England so lovingly described in The High Path.

Ted Walker was the first winner of the Cholmondeley Award.