Andrew Edmund Karpati Kennedy was an author and literary critic with a passionate interest in the language of drama.
Biography
Early years
Born in Győr in the west of Hungary, Kennedy spent his early childhood in Debrecen, where his father was manager of the Credit Bank. He attended the Calvinist Gymnasium in Debrecen from September 1941 until the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944.
Following the Nazi invasion, Kennedy was deported not to Auschwitz as intended but to a camp on the outskirts of Vienna, where he was forced to work making anti-aircraft guns for the Third Reich. After the war he returned to his studies, initially at his old school in Debrecen and then briefly in Budapest, attending the Fasori Gimnázium. While in Budapest he became an "avid theatre-goer", attending as many performances of plays and operas as he could afford, with his passion for the arts soon extending to concert-going and visits to the Museum of Fine Arts. In the autumn of 1947, when still only in his mid-teens, he moved to Ware in Hertfordshire, England, to stay with his uncle. He attended Hertford Grammar School and went on to read English literature and philosophy at the University of Bristol. There he was a regular contributor as theatre and art critic to the university's student newspaper Nonesuch News. After graduation, he spent a year in the Auvergne teaching English to students at a catering school in Clermont-Ferrand. He came back to England and took up a job in 1956 with the BBC Monitoring Service in London, working on the Hungarian desk. He taught English for at least a school year at Scarborough College in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. At around this time he met Judith Edmundson Hall, whom he wed in 1958. He settled in Cambridge, where he worked as a teacher of English as a second language before taking up an appointment as lecturer in the department of English at Bergen University, Norway in 1966. In 1972, he was awarded his doctorate on the languages of drama by the University of Bristol. In 1990, he became professor of British literature at Bergen. He was a Visiting Scholar at the universities of Edinburgh, Washington and Princeton, and in 1979–80 a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he became a Life Member. Kennedy died in Cambridge on 20 December 2016.
Writings
"Andrew Kennedy's contribution to the field of literature has been substantial and spans several literary genres to which he has contributed both as a critic and as creative writer." Whether writing literary criticism or a short story, Kennedy employed great economy of style, something he admired in Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, for example. The final duologue between the Student and the Young Lady, asserted Kennedy, "compresses a whole cycle of relationship – love, marriage and death – within the cycle of one sustained encounter." Both his book Six Dramatists in Search of a Language and Samuel Beckett were funded by grants from the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities. In a prefatory remark to The Antique Dealer's Women, George Steiner writing about Kennedy's earlier book Double Vision declared that Kennedy's stories "are vignettes of insightful and humane understanding. They are of a concise maturity all too rare in the current climate of narrative." Writing about his novella The Antique Dealer's Women, Elaine Feinstein was full of praise: "The prose is so elegant, so sensuous, so assured. Wonderful writing."
The Antique Dealer’s Women: Confessions Cambridge: Meadows Press, 2006
Chance Survivor Bristol: Old Guard Press, Shearsman Books Ltd, 2012
Besides his literary criticism, Kennedy also published poems and short stories.
Honours and awards
Lie, Ulf and Rønning, Anne Holden Dialoguing on Genres. Essays in Honour of Andrew K. Kennedy on his 70th Birthday 9 January 2001, incl. "Andrew K Kennedy: A Bibliography" compiled by Maya Thee. Oslo: Novus Forlag, 2001 In the book's foreword Lie and Rønning write: "The editors undertook this project in appreciation of Andrew's love of literature, his contribution to it as author and critic and his readiness to discuss it and help others appreciate it, students as well as colleagues."
