Anthony Simon Thwaite (23 June 1930 – 22 April 2021) was an English poet and critic, widely known as the editor of his friend Philip Larkin's collected poems and letters. Early years and education Born in Chester, England, to Yorkshire parents, Thwaite at the age of 10 crossed the Atlantic alone to spend the war years in and around Washington D.C. with an aunt and uncle. On D-Day in 1944 he was on his way home. At Kingswood School, Bath, a teacher, praising his Anglo-Saxon type riddles, encouraged him to think he was a poet. National Service near Leptis Magna in Libya, encouraged him further, both as a poet and as an amateur archaeologist (he eventually became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries). Thwaite came to early prominence as a poet. While still an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, he published a pamphlet with the Fantasy Press in a series that included the early work of Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jennings. Poems began to appear in The Listener, the New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement, and with his first book reviews and a series of undergraduate articles, in The Spectator. At Oxford, he edited the weekly magazine Isis, became president of the Poetry Society and met his wife, Ann Thwaite, who became a biographer. In 1955, they went by ship to teach in Japan for two years, where their first child was born and Thwaite's first book of poems was published, a tribute from his postgraduate students at the University of Tokyo. It was while he was there that the Marvell Press published Larkin's The Less Deceived and accepted the manuscript of his own Home Truths. Career Thwaite returned to take up a graduate traineeship at the BBC. He had eight years there, first as a radio producer (sharing at one stage an office with Louis MacNeice), then as Literary Editor of The Listener. In 1965, he took two years unpaid leave to return to North Africa, this time as assistant professor at the University of Libya in Benghazi and with his wife and four daughters. A brief return to the BBC in 1967 ended when Thwaite was invited to be Literary Editor of the New Statesman, where his assistants were successively Claire Tomalin and James Fenton. In 1968 he won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize for The Stones of Emptiness, a collection of poems written during