Douglas Dunn obituary: Poet and teacher who wrote about class and grief

The poet and academic Douglas Dunn, whose work covered working-class lives, Scottish history and landscapes, as well as his grief over the death of his first wife, has died aged 83.

Dunn was born in Inchinnan in Renfrewshire, and grew up in a council estate in the village. He left school to train as a librarian and, after working in Glasgow and the United States, studied English Literature as a mature student in Hull.

He was mentored there by the poet Philip Larkin, who both encouraged his writing and employed him as a librarian.

Dunn would go on to win the Whitbread Prize and the Queen's Medal for Poetry and was appointed an OBE in 2003.

Posting on the social media platform X, his fellow poet and St Andrews colleague Don Paterson described him as "the finest Scottish poet of the post-war period.

"Dougie was also someone we knew and loved as a dear friend, mentor and teacher, and he will be deeply missed."

Dunn was 26 when his first collection - Terry Street - was published by Faber. It was named after the working-class street where he had bought a small terraced house with his wife, Lesley.

The book was an immediate critical success, although a Guardian profile of the poet from 2003 quotes Dunn describing how it went down with his uncle.

He said his relative had told him: "I don't know why you bother, you will never be as great as the immortal Robert Burns."

Dunn added: "If you're a poet in Scotland, that is the sort of thing you have to put up with."

Dunn continued to work with Larkin in the University of Hull's library for a few years after graduation and the two became good friends.

They made an odd couple, Dunn far to the left politically and 20 years younger than the famously conservative poet. He explained they worked their way around this by mostly talking about their shared love of jazz.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Dunn worked as a freelance writer and editor as well as teaching.

His earlier work was heavily concerned with class, inequality, and poverty. This led to him being parodied in print by Clive James as "Douglas Dunge", portrayed as dour and hectoring, his verse written in impenetrable Scots.

In fact, his work - while dealing with serious, often heavy themes - was accessible, his love of music often credited with giving his work a rhythmic, immediate feel.

Dunn was surprised to be collected as an English poet in one volume of the early 1980s, and at times wrote about feeling less at home in his native country than his adopted one.

But that changed as the decade progressed.

His work become more personal, especially after the death of Lesley in 1981. The resulting collection - Elegies - won the Whitbread Book of the Year and remained among his most acclaimed works.

He returned to Scotland soon after as writer-in-residence at the University of Dundee. From there, he moved to St Andrews, where he became professor of English and head of the university's Scottish Studies Institute.

In his time there, he worked alongside fellow writers John Burnside, AL Kennedy and Don Paterson.

Dunn is survived by his third wife and the children of his second marriage.

Despite the serious nature of his subjects, Dunn was often loath to go into great detail about his writing.

In 2018 he told The Scotsman newspaper: "My belief is that a poem is very often about itself. It might pretend to be about something else but I think the best poems are written by poets who don't write 'aboutly'.

"If you want to write 'about' something, then write it in prose for God's sake!".