Джон Падней: Ағылшын ақыны, журналисі және жазушысы

British poet, journalist and author

John Sleigh Pudney (19 January 1909 – 10 November 1977) was a British poet, journalist and author. He was known especially for his popular poetry written during the Second World War, but he also wrote novels, short stories and children's fiction. His broad ranging non fiction, often commissioned, served as his primary source of income.

John Pudney was born at Langley Marish, the only son of Henry William Pudney, a farmer and countryman, and Mabel Sleigh Pudney. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, where he first encountered W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, and Humphrey Spender. He left school in 1925 at the age of sixteen, and spent several years working as an estate agent and studying to become a surveyor. However, he also began contributing articles to the News Chronicle while writing short stories and channelling his love of the countryside into verse. At the time he was one of a group of young writers, including Dylan Thomas, George Barker and David Gascoyne, that gathered about the well known bookshop at No 4, Parton Street near London's Red Lion Square, run by David Archer. His first published collection of verse, Spring Encounter, came out in 1933 from Methuen and gained the attention of Lady Ottoline Morrell who became a patron. Pudney also wrote for The Listener and worked as a producer at the BBC, where he produced the radio play Hadrian's Wall with text by Auden and music by Britten; it was broadcast from Newcastle on 25 November 1937. While at the BBC he also wrote one of the first plays for television, Edna's Fruit Hat, which was broadcast on 27 January 1939. His first novel, Jacobson's Ladder, describing literary and criminal life in 1930s Soho, appeared in 1938.

In the general election of July 1945, Pudney stood as the Labour Party candidate for Sevenoaks, polling 14,947 votes, or 36%. (The sitting Conservative MP Charles Ponsonby was re elected, with 46% of the vote.) After the war, he continued to write and worked as a journalist and editor. He was the book critic for the Daily Express from 1945 and with the News Review from 1948 to 1950. He then shifted into publishing, as a director and literary adviser to Evans Brothers, Ltd (1950–1953) and Putnam & Co Ltd (1953–1963). At Evans, Pudney bolstered the company's long standing children's catalogue with his own boys adventures, the 11 volume 'Fred and I' series (Monday Adventure, Spring Adventure etc.). One of them, Thursday Adventure (1955) was filmed as The Stolen Airliner (1955). They featured classic front cover and internal illustrations by artists such as Ley Kenyon (1913–1990) and Douglas Relf. The later six volumes of Hartwarp adventures for younger children were published by Hamish Hamilton. Both series were popular and sold well in the 1950s and 1960s, but they have gone out of print. More significantly, while at Evans Pudney commissioned the Australian fighter pilot and prisoner of war Paul Brickhill to come to England and write The Great Escape, which Evans published in 1950; it attracted much attention. He had suggested to the Air Historical Branch of the British Air Ministry that Brickhill should be considered as the author of a history of 617 Squadron. After the success of The Great Escape, it was also published by Evans as The Dam Busters (1951), which sold over one million copies in its first 50 years. Of his novels, The Net (1952, set in an aeronautical research station) and Thin Air (1961) were well received. The same year Pudney wrote the script for the documentary Elizabeth is Queen for Associated British Pathé, which received a BAFTA award. Between 1949 and 1963, he edited an annual anthology called Pick of Today's Short Stories. Commissioned non fiction (particularly aeronautical) became an important source of income for Pudney in his later years. Among these works were a history of the British state airline B. O. A. C. (The Seven Skies, 1959), and of Courage Brewery (A Draught of Contentment (1971). However, poetry remained the most important to him. His later work, from the collection Spill Out (1967) onward, took on a more ironic stance but was still vernacular, rather than academic, a period reflected in his second Selected Poems collection of 1973. One of his book blurbs describes him as "a poet who just missed being an intellectual". There were two daughters and a son. They divorced in 1955, and Pudney immediately married his second wife, Monica Forbes Curtis of the Forbes family. She helped him recover from his alcoholism, to which he publicly confessed in 1965 and emerged cured in 1967 – despite a hit and run accident in the middle that broke both his legs and dislocated his shoulder. Their son, Toby Perkins, is the Labour Member of Parliament for Chesterfield.