Ken Smith

Ken Smith (4 December 1938 - 27 June 2003) was an English poet.

Life
Smith was born in Rudston, Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer, and had an itinerant childhood. He attended Leeds University and studied under Geoffrey Hill; Tony Harrison and Jon Silkin were fellow students at the time.

He married Annie Minnis in 1960; they had one son and two daughters, but the marriage dissolved.

With Silkin, Smith co-edited Stand magazine, from 1963 to 1972. He won a [[Gregory Award for his first pamphlet of poetry in 1964, and had his first full eollection published in 1967.

In 1969 Smith took his family to the United States, where he was writer in residence at Slippery Rock State College in Pennsylvania, College of the Holy Cross, and Clark University in Massachusetts. His second collection, Work/Distances, was published in Chicago in 1972. He returned to Endland in 1973.

Smith taught at Leeds University as a Yorkshire arts fellow from 1976 to 1978.

In 1978 he began publishing with Bloodaxe Books, which would publish his work for the rest of his life. During the next decades he attracted a wider readership, and

He remarried in 1981, to the poet and artist Judi Benson; he thus became stepfather to her son.

He died from Legionnaire's Disease, contracted on a trip to Cuba.

Recognition

 * 1964 Gregory Award for The Pity
 * 1998 Cholmondeley Award

Poetry

 * The Pity, Jonathan Cape 1967.