English Poet Martin Booth 1944 - 2004

Martin Booth (7 September, 1944 – 12 February, 2004) was a prolific British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press.

Booth was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, where he attended King George V School, and left in 1964.

Career

He made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing elegant volumes by British and American poets, including slim volumes of work by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His own books of verse include The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village in which Booth was living at the time. The book features a series of lyrics in which he seeks links between the present and the Saxon past, and the man called Knot who gave his name to the village. Booth also accumulated a library of contemporary verse, which allowed him to produce anthologies and lectures.

In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War.

Booth was a veteran traveller who retained an enthusiasm for flying, also expressed in his poems, such as "Kent Says" and In Killing the Moscs. His interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers.

Many of Booth's works were linked to the British imperial past in China, Hong Kong and Central Asia. Booth was also fond of the United States, where he had many poet friends, and of Italy, which features in many of his later poems and in his novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990). These interests form a thread through his later novels, travel books and biographies.

Booth's novel Industry Of Souls was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.

Booth died of cancer in Devon in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo, a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children.

The 2010 film The American, starring George Clooney, was based on his novel A Very Private Gentleman.

Works

• Paper Pennies and Other Poems (1967)
• Supplication to the Himalayas. A Poem and Sketch (1968)
• In the Yenan Caves (1969)
• A Winnowing of Silence (1971) (poems)
• Pilgrims and Petitions (1971)
• The Crying Embers (1971) (poems)
• On the Death of Archdeacon Broix (1971)
• James Elroy Flecker, Unpublished Poems and Drafts (1971) (editor)
• White (1971)
• In Her Hands (1973) (poem)
• Teller: Four Poems (1973)
• Brevities (1974) (poems)
• Hands Twining Grasses (1974) (poems)
• Spawning The Os (1974)
• Yogh (1974) (poems)
• Snath (1975)
• Two Boys and a Girl, Playing in a Churchyard (1975) (poem)
• Stalks of Jade: Renderings of early Chinese erotic verse (1976)
• Horse and Rider, a poem (1976)
• The Book of Cats (1977) (editor with George MacBeth)
• Extending Upon the Kingdom (1977)
• Folio/Work in Progress. Poems (1977) (broadside anthology, editor with John Stathatos)
• The Knotting Sequence (1977)
• The Dying (1978)
• The Earth Man Dreams of a Turned Sod (1978)
• Winter's Night: Knotting (1979)
• Decadal: Ten Years of Sceptre Press (1979)
• Calling with Owls (1979) (poems)
• The Bad Track (1980) (novel)
• Devil's Wine (1980) (poems)
• Bismarck (1980)
• British Writing Today (1981) (editor)
• The Cnot Dialogues (1981)
• Meeting the Snowy North Again (1982) (poems)
• Looking for the Rainbow Sign: Poems of America (1983)
• Tenfold: Poems for Frances Horovitz (1983) (editor)
• Travelling Through the Senses: A Study of the Poetry of George MacBeth (1983)
• Contemporary British And North American Verse (1984) (editor)
• British Poetry 1964 to 1984: Driving through the barricades (1985)
• Hiroshima Joe (1985) (novel)
• Killing the Moscs (1985)
• Under the Sea (Impressions) (1985)
• Aleister Crowley: Selected Poems (1986)
• Carpet Sahib, A Life of Jim Corbett (1986) (biography of a shikari)
• The Jade Pavilion (1987) (novel)
• Black Chameleon (1988) (novel)
• Dreaming of Samrkand (1989) (novel)
• A Very Private Gentleman (1990) (novel), adapted as the 2010 film The American
• American Dreams. A Poem (1992) (broadside)
• Rhino Road: The Black and White Rhinos of Africa (1992)
• The Humble Disciple (1992) (novel)
• The Iron Tree (1993) (novel)
• Toys of Glass (1995) (novel)
• Adrift In The Oceans Of Mercy (1996)
• War Dog (1996) (novel)
• Opium: A History (1996)
• Doctor and the Detective - a Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1997)
• Music on the Bamboo Radio (1997) (novel)
• The Industry of Souls (1998) (novel)
• Magick Life: A Biography of Aleister Crowley (2000)
• The Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads (2000)
• PoW (2000)
• Panther (2001)
• Islands Of Silence (2002) (novel)
• The Alchemist's Son: Doctor Illuminatus (2003) (fantasy fiction)
• Cannabis: A History (2003)
• Gweilo: Memoirs of a Hong Kong childhood (2004) [US ed., 2005, published as Golden Boy]
• Midnight Saboteur (2004)
• The Alchemist's Son: Soul Stealer (2004)