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Robert Nye (born 1939) is an English poet who has also written novels as well as stories for children.

Robert Nye was born in London on 15 March 1939. His father was a civil servant, his mother a farmer's daughter. He attended Southend High School for Boys and had published poems in the London Magazine by the age of sixteen. He left school in 1955 and did not pursue additional formal study.

He was a conscientious objector during National Service in the late 1950s, and was given exemption from military service conditional upon joining the Friends Ambulance Unit and serving as a medical orderly at St Wulstan's Sanitorium, near Malvern, and then at Rochford General Hospital in Essex.

Between 1955 and 1961, he worked at a variety of jobs: newspaper reporter, milkman, postman, labourer in a market garden, and orderly in a sanitorium.

Nye married his first wife, Judith Pratt, in 1959. In 1961, they moved to a remote cottage in North Wales where Nye devoted himself full-time to writing. There he developed an interest in Welsh and Celtic legends reflected later in his fiction for both adults and children. His first book, Juvenilia 1 (1961), was a collection of poems. A second volume, Juvenilia 2 (1963), won the Eric Gregory Award. To support his continuance as a poet, Nye began to contribute reviews to British literary journals and newspapers. He became the poetry editor for The Scotsman in 1967, and served as poetry critic of The Times from 1971 to 1996, while also contributing regular reviews of new fiction to The Guardian.

Nye started writing stories for children to entertain his three young sons. His children's novel Taliesin and a collection of stories called March Has Horse's Ears were published by Faber and Faber in 1966. Nye published his first adult novel, Doubtfire, in 1967. That same year he divorced his first wife, then in 1968 married Aileen Campbell. The two moved to Edinburgh where they lived until 1977.

Nye's next publication after Doubtfire was a return to children's literature, a freewheeling version of Beowulf which has remained in print in many editions since 1968. In 1970, he published another children's book, Wishing Gold, and received the James Kennaway Memorial Award for his collection of short stories, Tales I Told My Mother (1969).

During the early 1970s Nye wrote several plays for BBC radio including A Bloody Stupit Hole (1970), Reynolds, Reynolds(1971), and a version of Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist (1971). He was also commissioned by Covent Garden Opera House to write an unpublished libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera, Kronia (1970). Nye held the position of writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh, 1976—1977, during which time he received the Guardian fiction prize, followed by the 1976 Hawthornden Prize for his novel Falstaff.

1978 saw the publication of his Merlin excursion into the Matter of Britain, equally convincing as romance or poetry or drug-induced hallucination.

He has continued to write poetry, publishing Darker Ends (1969) and Divisions on a Ground (1976), and to prepare editions of other poets with whose work he feels an affinity: Sir Walter Ralegh, William Barnes, and Laura Riding. His own Collected Poems appeared in 1995, and remains in print. His selected poems, entitled The Rain and The Glass, published in 2005, won the Cholmondeley Award. He has lived since 1977 in County Cork. Although his novels have won prizes and been translated into many languages, it is as a poet that he would probably prefer to be remembered. The critic Gabriel Josipovici has described him as "one of the most interesting poets writing today, with a voice unlike that of any of his contemporaries."

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