Author Profile

Vivien WhelptonI was educated at a boarding school in Devon and at Bedford College London. I taught English and Media Studies in secondary schools and F.E. colleges in England and Wales for nearly forty years and settled permanently in Suffolk in 1995. I am married with two adult children. Since retirement from teaching in 2006, I have been able to pursue my life-long interest in the history and literature of the First World War as well as my ambition to write literary biography. I have an M.A. in War Studies from King’s College London and am an accredited member of the Guild of Battlefield Guides, having conducted battlefield tours on the Western Front for several years. I began my belated ‘literary career’ by publishing two monographs in the Cecil Woolf War Poets series, one on a minor poet, Leslie Coulson, and the other (in collaboration with my brother, the naval historian David Childs) on the poetry of the Gallipoli Campaign. I have contributed articles to the War Poetry ReviewStand To! (the journal of the Western Front Association), The Use of English (the English Association journal), Despatches (the journal of the Guild of Battlefield Guides) and the Wilfred Owen Association and Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship journals.

A member of The Society of Authors and The Biographers’ Club, I am also an active member of The Wilfred Owen Association and The Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship. Apart from reading and visiting northern France, my leisure interests include walking in the Suffolk countryside. I enjoy the cinema, the theatre, ballet and folk music.

 

Singer OnceGallipoliLeslie Coulson: A Singer Once,
(2008), £7.00; and British and
Irish Poets of the Gallipoli
Campaign, 1915: Heirs of
Achilles 
(2010), £9.50. Price
inclusive of postage, obtainable
from Jean Moorcroft Wilson,
1 Mornington Place,
London, NW1 7RP