Culture of Cornwall Cornish poets. The Nobel-prizewinning novelist William Golding who was born in St Columb Minor in 1911, and returned to live near Truro from 1985 until his death in 1993. Other notable Cornish writers include Arthur Quiller-Couch, alias "Q", novelist and literary critic, Jack Clemo, deaf-blind poet, Ronald Bottrall, modernist poet, Robert Stephen Hawker, eccentric Victorian poet and priest, Geoffrey Grigson, poet and critic, Silas Hocking, a prolific novelist, and D. M. Thomas, novelist and poet. The late Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman was famously fond of Cornwall and it featured prominently in his poetry. He is buried in the churchyard
Robert Gittings in the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". While still at school he published poems and thus encountered Christopher Fry, a lifelong friend. At the University of Cambridge, he was encouraged by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor of the "Oxford Book of English Verse", whose rooms in college were near his, and in 1931 he was awarded the Chancellor's gold medal for English verse. In 1933, Gittings was elected a research fellow of Jesus College and became a history supervisor in 1938. In 1940. he took a job with BBC Radio as a producer and writer, remaining with the Corporation twenty-three years.