A. Desmond Hawkins on Auden's Dramatic Dynamite, ‘New English Weekly'

Novelist, critic, broadcaster, A. Desmond Hawkins (b. 1908) worked in the 1930s as Literary Editor of the ‘New English Weekly’, then of the quarterly ‘Purpose’ (where T.S. Eliot persuaded the owner-editor to allow Hawkins a free hand), and as Fiction Chronicler of the ‘Criterion’. In 1946 he became Features Producer, BBC West Region, and Head of Programmes in 1955; he founded the BBC Natural History Unit in 1959. His publications include ‘Poetry and Prose of John Donne’ (1938), ‘Stories, Essays and Poems of D.H. Lawrence’ (1939), ‘The BBC Naturalist’ (1957), and ‘Hardy the Novelist’ (1965).