Want fewer ads?

Alan Norman Bold (1943—1998) was a Scottish poet, biographer and journalist.

He edited Hugh MacDiarmid's Letters and wrote the influential biography MacDiarmid. Bold had acquainted himself with MacDiarmid in 1963 while still an English Literature student at Edinburgh University. His debut work, Society Inebrious was published in 1965 during Bold's final university year. It contains a lengthy introduction by MacDiarmid which is only partly relevant to Bold's poetry. This early publication kick-started a prolific poetic career with Bold publishing another three books of verse before the end of the decade, including the ambitious book-length poem The State of the Nation.

Bold also edited The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970) and published a biography of Robert Burns.

A life-long heavy drinker who dealt with the boozy life of the poet in such collections as A Pint of Bitter, Alan Bold suffered a heart attack in early 1998 and died in a hospital in Kirkcaldy at the age of 54.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alan Bold", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0