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.

In no particular order, my non-literary interests are wildlife conservation, running, and Plymouth Argyle.