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The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895.
Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy.
He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka.
Here in the Henry Williamson Society's website you can explore the man, his life, and his place in English Literature and history.
Members of the Society are invited to submit their favourite passage (200–750 words) from any of Henry Williamson's books for inclusion in the new webpage that we are developing of extracts from his works.
The September 2010 issue of BBC's Wildlife magazine contains an excellent article by Michael Morpurgo, 'The Greatest Animal Stories Ever Told', among which he includes Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon, the latter being, he considers, 'the more extraordinary of these two masterpieces'. In the same issue is the feature 'My favourite book is . . .', and author and naturalist Mark Cocker chooses The Phasian Bird: 'No one has more intimately or beautifully evoked what it might to be like to be a game bird than this oddly brilliant author.'
NEWLY AVAILABLE:
 | | This newly released DVD was filmed in HD by Harry Williamson, youngest son of Henry, using the dramatic and varied landscape of North Devon and Australia both to accompany the first live performance of his Tarka symphony and to illustrate his original vision of connecting the music to the landscape it
describes. Inspired by Tarka the Otter and composed in 1975 by Harry Williamson and Anthony Phillips, the symphony is in four movements. The soundtrack on the DVD is from the 1996 CD of Tarka.
In stock, this is available through our online shop, where full details will be found. | | | |
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| A new paperback edition of Salar the Salmon has just been published (May 2010) by Little Toller Books. This attractive new edition features C.F. Tunnicliffe's black and white illustrations from the 1936 edition, together with a new introduction by Michael Morpurgo, one of Britain's best-loved authors,who served as Children's Laureate between 2003–2005.
Please see our online bookshop for further details, and to order. Copies will be supplied immediately from stock. |
Henry Williamson and his work: a selection of the views of writers and critics, in no particular order:–
Ted Hughes, address at the memorial service for HenryWilliamson, 1 December 1977, on Tarka the Otter
| In the confrontations of creature and creature, of creature and object, of creature and fate – he made me feel the pathos of actuality in the natural world . . . I now know that only the finest writers are ever able to evoke it . . . It is not usual to consider [Henry Williamson] as a poet. But I believe he was one of the truest English poets of his generation.
| | | | Michael Morpurgo, Introduction to Salar the Salmon, 2010
| It is a rare gift indeed for a storyteller to be poet as much as a storyteller,
to tell a tale so deeply engaging that the reader wants to know what will happen
and never want it to end, and yet at the same time tells it in such a way as to
leave a reader wide-eyed with amazement at the sheer intensity of feeling that
can be induced by the word-magic of a poet. Henry Williamson is just such a
story-maker poet. | | | | T.E. Lawrence to Edward Garnett, 1928
| If I'd known he was so practiced I wouldn't have dared write him.
| | | | Malcolm Elwin, 1957
| He emerges as one of the most impressively gifted and lavishly creative among writers of modern fiction.
| | | | James Hanley, on Young Phillip Maddison
| How well Mr Williamson conveys all the secret thoughts and doings of boys, living lives that are all heights and depths. Magically he suggests the era by subtle decription.
| | | | Allan Wykes, review of The Innocent Moon in the Sunday Times
| To follow Mr Williamson through all the tones and tempers of his chronicle is to emerge with a sense – insistent and triumphant – of having been brushed by experience.
| | | | Michael Bradbury, review of The Power Of The Dead in Punch
| What emerges is a deep sense of truthfulness and accuracy and a complexity of experience.
| | | | Walter de la Mare to Putnams, 1926
| I have always thought that Williamson had a tinge of that very rare quality, or whatever it may be, called genius; and I feel convinced that in time it will be more fully recognised . . .
| | | | George D. Painter, 1959
| It will be among the accepted facts of English literary history that our only two great novelists writing in the second quarter of the twentieth century, after the deaths of Lawrence and Joyce, were John Cowper Powys and Henry Williamson.
| | | | L.A.G. Strong, 1945
| Few writers hold so surely the balance between outer and inner truth; fewer so generously share their vision with their reader.
| | | | John Galsworthy to Edward Garnett, 1926
| Do you know the work of Henry Williamson? It's uneven but at it's best extraordinarily good I think.
| | | | John Betjeman, review of The Dark Lantern in the Daily Telegraph
| There is a magic about this book . . . this excursion into a late Victorian suburb and merchant materialism is unexpected and it is as genuine and affectionate as it is accomplished.
| | | | General Sir Hubert Gough, letter to Henry Williamson
| I have re-read your story of our Fifth Army [A Test to Destruction], and was greatly moved. It made me realise once again what a wonderful people the British are.
| | | | Times Literary Supplement review of The Golden Virgin
| It is difficult to know which to admire the more, the skill of the characterisation or the art by which the character is subordinated to the theme without contrivance and without loss of humanity . . . The contrast between the tenderness of youth and the cruelty of war is most effectively described.
| | | | George D. Painter, review of How Dear is Life in The Listener
| Mr Williamson's prose is like sunlight and clear air; and then, when necessary, it has the taste of fear in the mouth, the terrible beauty of life on the edge of the abyss.
| | | | Kenneth Allsop, review of It Was The Nightgale in the Daily Mail
| The sad beauty of the love story laces a huge exquisitely worked tapestry of period and people.
| | | | Ernest Wycherley, review of A Solitary War in the Daily Express
| This astonishing sequence [A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight]. It is a major mark he is making on the modern novel.
| | | | James Hanley, on Young Phillip Maddison
| How well Mr Williamson conveys all the secret thoughts and doings of boys, living lives that are all heights and depths. Magically he suggests the era by subtle decription.
| | | | Frank Swinnerton, 1937
| Henry Williamson . . . seems to spend his days up to his waist or neck in a Devonshire river, watching the habits of otters, salmon and other wild creatures.
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We will add to these opinions from time to time. Submissions to the webmaster of further examples are welcomed.
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