J.R. Ackerley

(1896 - 1967)

Joe Randolph Ackerley enlisted in the army at the age of eighteen in 1914, sustaining a wound and enduring eight months of imprisonment in Germany in 1918—an experience he revisited in The Prisoners of War, published in 1925. Between 1935 and 1959 he served as the literary editor of the BBC’s magazine, The Listener. His memoir, My Father and Myself, detailing his familial and sexual life, was published posthumously in 1968, followed by E.M. Forster: A Portrait in 1970 and his correspondence, The Ackerley Letters, in 1975.