Background

Geoffrey Hill was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, June 18, 1932. He was the son of a police constable.

Education

When he was six, his family moved to nearby Fairfield in Worcestershire, where he attended the local primary school, then the grammar school in Bromsgrove. In 1950 he was admitted to Keble College, Oxford, to read English, where he published his first poems in 1952, at the age of twenty, in an eponymous Fantasy Press volume.

Career

Upon graduation from Oxford with a first, Hill embarked on an academic career, teaching at the University of Leeds from 1954 until 1980, from 1976 as professor of English Literature. After leaving Leeds, he spent a year at the University of Bristol on a Churchill Scholarship before becoming a teaching fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he taught from 1981 until 1988. He then moved to the United States, to serve as University Professor and Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. In 2006, he moved back to Cambridge, England.

Achievements

• Mercian Hymns won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the inaugural Whitbread Award for Poetry in 1971. Hill won as well the Eric Gregory Award in 1961.
  
  Hill was awarded an honorary D.Litt. degree by the University of Leeds in 1988, the same year he received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award.
  
  In 2009 his Collected Critical Writings won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism.
  
  Hill was created a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Works

More photos

• book

  • King Log 1968
  • Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 2013
  • Peer Gynt and Brand (Penguin Classics)
  • Peer Gynt and Brand (Penguin Classics)
  • The Orchards of Syon 2002
  • A Treatise of Civil Power 2007
  • Selected Poems 2010

• Other Work

  • The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (A Galaxy book) 1984

Membership

Hill was an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Connections

Hill was married twice. His first marriage to Nancy Whittaker, which produced four children, Julian, Andrew, Jeremy and Bethany, ended in divorce. His second marriage to the American poet, and later Anglican priest, Alice Goodman occurred in 1987. The couple had a daughter, Alberta. The marriage lasted until Hill's death.

Father:

William George Hill

Mother:

Hilda Beatrice Hill (nee Hands)

Spouse:

Nancy Whittaker

Spouse:

Alice Goodman

Alice Goodman (born 1958) is an American poet and librettist. She is also an Anglican priest, working in England.

References

• Geoffrey Hill (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
• Geoffrey Hill (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
• Geoffrey Hill (Writers and their Work)