Philip Blake Morrison FRSL (born 8 October 1950) is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Life and career
Morrison was born in Skipton, North Yorkshire, to an English father and an Irish mother. His parents were both physicians; his mother's maiden name was Agnes O'Shea, but her husband persuaded her to change "Agnes" to "Kim". The details of his mother's life in Ireland, to which Morrison had not been privy, formed the basis for his memoir, Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002).
Morrison lived in Thornton-in-Craven and attended Ermysted's Grammar School. He later studied English literature at the University of Nottingham and UCL. He worked for The Times Literary Supplement (1978–81) and was literary editor of both The Observer (1981–89) and the Independent on Sunday (1989–95). Morrison's early writing career outside of journalism was as a poet and poetry critic.
He became a full-time writer in 1995 and has since produced novels and volumes of autobiography as well as plays, libretti, and writing for television. He has contributed articles to The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, The New York Times and Poetry Review and since 2001 he has written regularly for The Guardian.
In 2003, he became Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, London, and in 2008 he became chair of The Reader Organisation, the UK centre for research and promotion of reading as a therapeutic activity. In 2006, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by Plymouth University.
Morrison is Patron of Guildford-based educational, cultural and social community hub The Guildford Institute.
Published works
His first book was The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford University Press, 1980). This was followed in 1982 by a critical guide to Seamus Heaney's poetry. Also in 1982 he co-edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry with Andrew Motion. Morrison's first book of poetry, Dark Glasses, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1984. Other published works include Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper (1986), written in Yorkshire dialect, and Pendle Witches (1996), illustrated with etchings by Paula Rego. His poems have also appeared in several anthologies, including Penguin Modern Poets 1 (1995).
His first novel was The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (Chatto & Windus, 2000), a fictionalized account of the life of Johannes Gutenberg. South of the River, described by The Observer as "a fat summer read of a novel, panoramic and commercial", was published in April 2007.
Memoirs
Morrison has been much acclaimed as a memoirist. His book And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993) was hailed by Hugo Williams in The Spectator as "a classic of family literature", and praised by Roy Hattersley in The Guardian as "a near-masterpiece", while Nick Hornby called it a "painful, funny, frightening, moving, marvellous book". It became a bestseller, winning the Waterstone's/Volvo/Esquire Award for Non-Fiction and the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.
The companion volume, Things My Mother Never Told Me, published in 2002, was equally well received, including by Margaret Drabble, who wrote that Morrison "has succeeded in giving an enduring presence to his mother, that which she would never have claimed for herself. It is an honourable achievement", while the reviewer for The New York Times concluded: "I don't expect to read a more enthralling memoir all year. Or a finer book on love and love's impediments." Morrison's most recent memoir is Two Sisters (2023), which Rachel Cooke characterised as "a wonderfully heartfelt and tender thing: delicate and unstinting and clear-eyed."