Martin Starkie (25 November 1922 – 5 November 2010) was an English actor, writer and director for theatre, radio and television. The Oxford University Poetry Society administers the annual Martin Starkie Prize in his honour.

Early life

Martin Starkie was born in

Burnley Burnley () is a town and the administrative centre of the wider Borough of Burnley in Lancashire, England, with a 2021 population of 78,266. It is north of Manchester and east of Preston, at the confluence of the River Calder and River B ...

and educated at

Burnley Grammar School Burnley Grammar School was latterly, a state-funded selective boys' grammar school, situated in Byron Street in Burnley, Lancashire. However, during its long history, it moved between a number of sites in the town. History In 1552, on the orde ...

and

Exeter College, Oxford Exeter College (in full: The Rector and Scholars of Exeter College in the University of Oxford) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, and the fourth-oldest college of the university. The college was founde ...

, under critic

Nevill Coghill Nevill Henry Kendal Aylmer Coghill (19 April 1899 – 6 November 1980) was an Anglo-Irish literary scholar, known especially for his modern-English version of Geoffrey Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tales''. He was an associate of the literary discuss ...

. In 1946 he founded the Oxford University Poetry Society, and with Roy McNab edited the

Oxford Poetry ''Oxford Poetry'' is a literary magazine based in Oxford, England. It is currently edited by Luke Allan. The magazine is published by Partus Press. Founded in 1910 by Basil Blackwell, its editors have included Dorothy L. Sayers, Aldous Huxle ...

magazine in 1947.

Career

He made his name in the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

's The Third Programme and on television in the 1950s. He went on to write with

and composers Richard Hill and John Hawkins, and to produce and direct ''

Canterbury Tales ''The Canterbury Tales'' () is a collection of 24 stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. The book presents the tales, which are mostly written in verse (poetry), verse, as part of a fictional storytellin ...

'', based on Coghill's translation of the original, first in Oxford, then in the West End, on Broadway and in Australia. He founded the Chaucer Festival in 1986 which ran annual events in Southwark and London for a number of years and later set up the Chaucer Centre in Canterbury. He is represented, as the character of Geoffrey Chaucer, by a bas-relief image on the plinth of the Chaucer statue in Canterbury which is situated at the junction of Best Lane and the High Street. At the time of his death, he was living at Horbury Villa, 85 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill, London.

References

External links

* * Alumni of Exeter College, Oxford People educated at Burnley Grammar School English theatre directors People from Burnley 2010 deaths 1922 births English male dramatists and playwrights 20th-century English dramatists and playwrights 20th-century English male writers {{theat-director-stub