and Editorial Assistant in 1972. Earlier in his journalistic career, like Hitchens, he had written for Socialist Worker, the weekly paper of the British trotskyist group then known as the International Socialists. Fenton was an occasional war reporter in Vietnam during the late phase of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. His experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia from summer 1973 form a part of All the Wrong Places (1988). The publication of the book revealed some of Fenton's second thoughts about revolutionary socialism. In 1983, Fenton accompanied his friend Redmond O'Hanlon to Borneo. A description of the voyage can be found in the book Into the Heart of Borneo. Fenton won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1984 for Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984. He was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1994, a post he held till 1999. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2007. The American composer Charles Wuorinen set several of his poems to music, and Fenton served as librettist for Wuorinen's opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories (2001, premiered in 2004), based on Salman Rushdie's novel. Fenton has said: "The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation." In response to criticisms of his comparatively slim Selected Poems (2006), he warned against the notion of poets churning out poetry in a regular, automated fashion. Fenton has been a frequent contributor to The Guardian, The Independent and The New York Review of Books. He also writes the head column in the editorials of each Friday's Evening Standard. In 2007, he appeared in a list of the "100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain" published by The Independent on Sunday. Fenton's partner is Darryl Pinckney, the prize-winning novelist, playwright and essayist perhaps best known for the novel High Cotton (1992). In February 2019, The Guardian published an article criticising Fenton for his earlier stance on the conductor Robert King, who was convicted of sexually abusing five minors. The 2019 article was by one of the victims of King's repeated abuse; Fenton's earlier article concentrated entirely on the 'professional catastrophe' that King and to a lesser extent his record label would suffer, and made no mention of the harm to the boys, who were talented musicians being mentored by King. Musical theatre influence Fenton has been influenced