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Patrick Joseph Kavanagh [not to be confused with the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh] is an English poet, lecturer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. His father was the ITMA scriptwriter, Ted Kavanagh.
PJ Kavanagh first worked as a Butlin's Redcoat, then as a newsreader for Radiodiffusion Francaise, in Paris. He attended acting classes but was called up for his National Service, and was wounded in the Korean War. While studying at Merton College, Oxford, and starting to write poetry, he met and later married Sally Phillips, the daughter of novelist Rosamund Lehmann. She tragically died while they were living in Java, where he was teaching for the British Council. His memoir about this period, The Perfect Stranger won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize. Since then, he is known as a writer and broadcaster.
He has published several volumes of poetry: One And One, On The Way To The Depot, About Time, Edward Thomas in Heaven, Life Before Death and An Enchantment and Something About. There have also been collections: Selected Poems, Presences: New And Selected Poems, and Collected Poems. In 1992 he was given the Cholmondeley Award for poetry.
Kavanagh's first novel A Song and Dance, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize, thereafter he has written three further novels A Happy Man, People and Weather, and Only By Mistake, and two novels for children: Scarf Jack and Rebel for Good.
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