Here's a fascinating interview with Dominic Hibberd shortly after the publication of his new biography of WW1 Poet Wilfred Owen on BBC Radio 2002. John William Dominic Hibberd, writer and biographer, born 3 November 1941; died 12 August 2012 Wilfred Owen died aged 25 on 4th November 1918, a week before the end of the Great War. He was completely unknown at the time of his death with only five of his poems having been published. Yet he became one of the most popular poets of the 20th Century and is now the national poet of war. For decades very little was known about Owen's life as his public image was firmly controlled by his family and friends, not least by his brother Harold, who was obsessed by class, personal failure and terror lest anyone should suspect Wilfred of having been gay. Great Salopians: Wilfred Owen Biography of Britain's greatest war poet It's partly because of the myths surrounding him that Owen was seen as a typical soldier. In this new biography, the author, Dominic Hibberd makes it clear that Wilfred Owen was anything but typical. Owen, born in 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire, joined up in 1915 and was sent to the front in 1917 as an officer with the Manchester Regiment. The horrors he endured whilst fighting near the Somme in bitter winter conditions inspired some of his greatest poems. In a letter to his mother, he described his experience as "seventh hell". Dominic Hibberd, an acknowledged authority on Wilfred Own, has discovered new information at virtually every point in Owen's life, refashioning and reinterpreting what is known about the First World War's greatest poet - the reality of his childhood and his work as a pupil-teacher; the Evangelical pressures on him from 1911 -13 when he worked as a parish assistant; his time in France where he was a tutor and began to develop as a poet; his joining-up in 1915; his terrible experiences at the Front in 1917 and the question over his shellshock and the accusation of cowardice; his time at Craiglockhart where he met Siegfried Sassoon who encouraged him directly to write about the war; his time at Scarborough (1917-1918) where he found his mature voice as a poet; his sexual orientation and gay friends in London; and his final months in France, a victory for him as a man and as a poet, as well as a tragedy. Wilfred Owen Dominic Hibberd's biographyOwen, whose work did not achieve widespread fame until the 1960s, was killed leading his men in an attempt to bridge the Oise-Sambre canal under heavy fire. His family were given the news a week later, on 11th November 1918. the day the war ended. "As the bells celebrating the armistice were ringing in Shrewsbury, the postman arrived to give his parents the telegram," said Peter Owen, Wilfred's nephew. Great Salopians: Wilfred Owen Read our biography of Britain's greatest war poet Illustrated with over 50 photographs, eight maps and several drawings, this fascinating and compelling biography brings the reader much closer than ever before to the real Wilfred Owen, a complex, endearing and deeply impressive man. Dominic Hibberd, who has died aged 70, was the world's leading authority on the life and work of Wilfred Owen. In 1973 he became the fourth editor of Owen's war poems, following Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Cecil Day-Lewis. His critical work Owen the Poet (1986) was a study of what Owen himself had termed his "poethood". It included corrections and re-readings of texts, and revealed a continuity in Owen's poetic voice, establishing that much of the language and imagery of the 1917-18 poems was in place long before Owen experienced the realities of the western front. Wilfred Owen: The Last Year (1992) emphasised the importance of Owen's shell-shock doctor Arthur Brock, and of Sassoon, in suggesting war as a subject for his poetry. The publication, in 2002, of Hibberd's Wilfred Owen: A New Biography represented the culmination of almost three decades of research and writing on the subject. With the co-operation of members of Owen's family, including his cousin Leslie Gunston and his eldest nephew, Peter Owen, Hibberd corrected innumerable details of fact and chronology and broke important new ground. Hibberd was well aware that the biographical waters had been muddied at an early stage by Owen's younger brother Harold, who had censored letters, and refused for many years to authorise a proper biography of Wilfred, preferring instead to publish his own, highly subjective and often inaccurate portrait of his brother in three volumes. In particular, Harold had been desperate to shield his brother from any imputations of homosexuality.

• published: 03 Apr 2015
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