Tony Kendrew

Tony Kendrew was born and educated as a Brit and lived in Northern California for thirty-five years before moving to Arkansas in 2021. He spent the first three decades of his life wandering the old world – Europe, Asia, Africa – inspired by a love of nature and a desire to explore and experience the beauty the earth has to offer.

Between these global explorations he managed a degree at Cambridge, A Diploma in Education in East Africa and an MA in London, though he still felt barely qualified to take on the world as he knew it.

A huge variety of jobs came his way, from teacher to cab driver, copy writer to expedition leader, publisher to famine relief administrator, classical radio host to home health scheduler.

Writing about his observations has always been a part of his life, but it was only after he settled in Northern California in the 1980s that an imaginative recreation of those experiences into stories and poems began.

The next few years saw an exploration of the craft of writing through workshops and sessions with friends at café tables, and readings at monthly writers’ gatherings. Many of the short stories and poems of these years explore connections between the inner world and the outer landscape of his chosen home.

Encounters with the natural world, with living things and living landscape, have been a powerful inspiration. Putting into words the special quality of these encounters seems equally natural, and was the goal of the CD of poems that he recorded in 2008: Beasts and Beloveds. It was on the strength of this CD that he was invited to read at the Walking Words Festival in Telluride, Colorado, the following year.

A couple of years later he completed a series of seven poems in praise of the river that runs through the valley he called home for twelve years: Seven Views of the South Fork River.

In 2012 he travelled to Wales to do the Creative Writing MA at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. While there his first collection of poems, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, was published by Iconau. Feathers draws together reflections on the people and places of Northern California and Wales, and is available as a paperback.

His MA dissertation, Turning, was a series of twenty-two poems reflecting on movement, migration and the sense of place and identity. First published as a CD it is now available on Amazon as a paperback, or ebook for Kindle.

Tony is on the editorial board of The Lampeter Review and writes a regular piece for the magazine called States: From the Left Coast, which reflects on various topics, literary and not-so literary, that occur to a long-time British expatriate living in California.

A couple of Tony’s short stories have also appeared in The Lampeter Review, and they appear in his collection of stories - some funny, some weird, some deep, some fairy, some almost flash - published in November 2020 as Transatlanecdotes, A Little Book of Quite Short Stories - now available on Amazon as a paperback or ebook for Kindle.

For a year and more Tony worked as editor of On the Mystery of Being, for Science and Nonduality. This fabulous collection of essays, subtitled Contemporary Insights on the Convergence of Science and Spirituality, was published by New Harbinger in 2019.

Tony is working on some websites of his poetry and prose, but a good place to start is to search on his name. There are only three or four Tony Kendrews in the world. He’s not the one from Northampton nor the fire chief in New Zealand!