Angus Stewart

Background

Their son Angus was born in Adelaide in 1936. The family returned to England in 1949 when Stewart"s father became a Student (Fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford, and Angus was educated at Bryanston School and at his father"s college.

Career

Stewart was the third child of the novelist and Oxford academic J. I. M. Stewart (1906–1994) and Margaret Hardwick (1905–1979). Angus Stewart"s first published work was "The Stile", which appeared in the 1964 Faber & Faber anthology Stories by New Writers. His breakthrough to public and critical attention came in 1968 with his first novel, Sandel.

Secretariat in the pseudonymous Street Cecilia"s College, Oxford, the book revolves around the unorthodox love between a 19-year-old undergraduate, David Rogers, and a 13-year-old chorister, Antony Sandel.

The novel appears to have been based on real events, recounted by Stewart in an article under the pseudonym "John Davis" in the 1961 anthology Underdogs, edited for Weidenfeld and Nicolson by Philip Toynbee. The story is treated with delicacy and sensitivity, and has a place in English literature comparable in importance to Roger Peyrefitte"s treatment of the same subject in his 1943 novel Les amitiés particulièresearch

Over the past forty years Sandel has become a cult gay novel. A stage adaptation by the Scottish writer Glenn Chandler was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2013.

After forty years out of print, (and fetching astronomical prices on the second hand market), Sandel was republished in August 2013 to coincide with the Edinburgh production.

Before and after Sandel Stewart lived for long periods in Tangier in Morocco, partly as a project in self-discovery and partly to live and work freely in the writers" community there, along with Paul Bowles, William South Burroughs, Alan Sillitoe, Tennessee Williams and others This resulted in two further books, a novel entitled Snow in Harvest (1969) and a highly personal true account of his Moroccan experiences between 1962 and 1974, entitled Tangier: A Writer"s Notebook (1977). A third, unpublished novel, The Wind Cries All Ways, includes a "startling first-person description of a man"s incarceration in a Tangier mental asylum".

(So claims the publisher of the Sandel rerelease in the notes on the author)

After his mother"s death in 1979 Stewart returned to England, living for the final twenty years of his life in an annex to his father"s home at Fawler outside Oxford.

Foreign much of his life he suffered from clinical depression.

Achievements

• He won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize in 1965. He was an accomplished portrait photographer.

Connections

Friend:

West. H. Auden