Professor Tim Kendall

My latest book, co-authored with Fiona Mathews and shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, is Black Ops & Beaver Bombing: Adventures with Britain's Wild Mammals (Oneworld, 2023). Part natural history, part travel writing, and part bad jokes (what exactly did the beaver say to the tree?), the book criss-crosses Britain in search of eight mammal species that are threatened with extinction. The animals are the heroes. There is no spiritual healing and no self-discovery.

My anthology Poetry of the Second World War, a kind of sequel to Poetry of the First World War (2014), was published by Oxford World's Classics in October 2024. Let's hope it's the last in the series.

William Golding: the Faber Letters, my edition of correspondence between Golding and his publisher, is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in November 2025. 

Biography: I was born in Plymouth in 1970. At Oxford I completed my BA (1991) and D.Phil (1994). I spent a year there as lecturer before taking up a research post in Newcastle. Two years after that, I accepted my first permanent position at Bristol. I returned to Devon as Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter in 2006, and served as Head of Department from 2007 to 2013. My non-literary interests are wildlife conservation, running, and Plymouth Argyle.