Author and academic Bradbury dies

LONDON, England -- British author Sir Malcolm Bradbury has died at the age of 68.

The writer of The History Man died on Monday lunchtime after a long illness at his home in Norwich, England.

His son, Dominic Bradbury, said: "His family were around him when he died, my mother Elizabeth, myself and my brother Matthew.

"He was very comfortable when he died. He had been ill for some time but he had really become much more seriously ill, quite rapidly, over the last few weeks."

Bradbury was as famous for his teaching skills as for his screenplays and novels.

He was from the first UK grammar school generation who moved into the country's universities in the 1950s and always committed himself to spreading literature through the act of teaching.

The son of a railway man, he was not an elitist and the 40-odd books of literary criticism he produced were accessible enough to reach a wide audience.

As a boy he suffered from a heart condition that kept him off the sports field and in the school library.

He met his librarian wife Elizabeth in Nottinghamshire County library in 1956 before he started teaching.

In 1959 he wrote his first "campus" novel, Eating People is Wrong, while tutoring at Hull alongside Richard Hoggart.

Since then he has written six novels, including Stepping Westwards, The History Man, Doctor Criminale, Jacques The Fatalist, Rates Of Exchange and To The Hermitage, and several television adaptations including The Gravy Train.

Bradbury became known as "the creative writing man" soon after he began teaching American Studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 1965.

He set up a creative writing MA course there with Angus Wilson in 1970, to give apprentices a home in a traditional academic environment.

Famously his first student was the author Ian McEwan, who wrote Black Dogs and the Cement Garden. Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote The Remains Of The Day, also gained from his teaching.

Since then he helped so many fledgling writers find their voice he has made UEA virtually synonymous with new British writing -- a culture that some of the Oxbridge literati refer to as a "mafia".

When Bradbury retired from UEA in 1995, the course became headed by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.

He leaves two sons Dominic and Matthew.

There will be a private funeral and a memorial service, probably in January.

The present Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, who took over the creative writing course at East Anglia when Sir Malcolm retired in 1995, told the UK's Times newspaper his death was "desolating news".

And the novelist David Lodge also told The Times: "Malcolm was my oldest and closest writer friend.

"He was not only an important novelist but a man of letters of a kind that is now rare."

Malcolm Bradbury
Malcolm Bradbury
University of East Anglia

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