Ian Kenneth Patterson (born 31 August 1948) is a British poet, translator and academic. He is a Life Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, having retired in 2018 from his post as Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Director of Studies in English and Fellow Librarian.Dr Ian Patterson, Queens' College, Cambridge
Education and career Ian Patterson was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA degree in English in 1969. He returned to academia in the 1990s to write a PhD, and in 1995 was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge. In 1999 he moved to Queens', where he was to teach English as a fellow of the college for the next 20 years.Dr Ian Patterson, Cambridge University Faculty of English. Accessed 2 July 2020.
Work In 2017 Ian Patterson won the Forward Prize for best single poem for "The Plenty of Nothing", an elegy to his wife, Jenny Diski.Flood, Alison, "Husband's Elegy for Jenny Diski wins Forward Prize Best Single Poem", The Guardian, 21 September 2017
Patterson has written a non-fiction book about the bombing of Guernica and the Spanish Civil War.Bragg, Melvyn, "Picasso's Guernica", In Our Time, 2 November 2017 He is also a translator: works include the final volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel ProustWood, Michael, "The Thing", London Review of Books, 6 January 2015 and works by Charles Fourier and Alain Touraine. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, writing on subjects as diverse as Jilly Cooper,Vincent, Alice, "Jilly Cooper compared to Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope by Cambridge academic", The Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2017 libraries and Ann Quin.Ian Patterson, London Review of Books
Personal life Patterson was married to the writer Jenny Diski from 2008 until her death in 2016. He appears as The Poet in her writing.Flood, Alison, "Author Jenny Diski, diagnosed with inoperable cancer, dies aged 68", The Guardian, 28 April 2016. In 2017, he married the writer Olivia Laing.Laing, Olivia, "The acclaimed author of The Lonely City on loneliness, marrying the poet Ian Patterson and the challenges of intimacy", The Sunday Times, 24 June 2018. He is the editor of Nemo's Almanac, according to The Guardian "the world's hardest book quiz". Previous editors include Alan Hollinghurst.
Awards and honours 2017 Forward Prize, Best Single Poem, "The Plenty of Nothing".
Bibliography
Non-fiction Nemo's Almanac (Profile Books, 2017) Guernica and Total War (Profile Books, 2007) War and Literature (Boydell & Brewer, 2014), edited, with Laura Ashe Books: A Manifesto, or, How to Build a Library (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025)
Poetry Thing of Reason (Black Suede Boot Press, 1974) Endless Demands (Holophrase, 1983) No Dice (Poetical Histories, 1988) Roughly Speaking (Cambridge, 1990) Tense Fodder (Equipage, 1993) Much More Pronounced (Equipage, 1999) Time to Get Here: Selected Poems 1969–2002 (Salt, 2003) The Glass Bell (Barque Press, 2009) Time Dust (Equipage, 2015) Still Life (Oystercatcher, 2015) Bound To Be (Equipage, 2017) Shell Vestige Disputed (Broken Sleep Books, 2023) Collected Poems 1975–2023 (Broken Sleep Books, 2024)
Translation Alain Touraine et al., The Workers' Movement (Cambridge University Press, 1987) Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 6: Finding Time Again (Penguin, 2003)
References
External links https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/ian-patterson https://www.queens.cam.ac.uk/dr-ian-patterson https://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/?i=68