Veronica Forrest Thomson

Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest Thomson (28 November 1947 – 26 April 1975) was a poet and a critical theorist.

Born in Malaya to rubber planter John Forrest Thomson and his wife Jean (Veronica hyphenated the surname herself, having originally published under the name Veronica Forrest), she grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She studied at the University of Liverpool (B.A. 1967) and Girton College, Cambridge (Ph.D 1971; her first supervisor was the poet J. H. Prynne), and later taught at the Universities of Leicester and Birmingham. Her critical study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was published by Manchester University Press in 1978. 'Poetic Artifice', edited with notes and an introduction by Gareth Farmer, was reissued in 2016 with Shearsman press. Her poetry collections included Identi-kit (1967), the award-winning Language-Games (1971) and the posthumous On the Periphery (1976). Subsequent gatherings of her work include Collected Poems and Translations (1990) and Selected Poems (1999). A further Collected Poems, minus the translations, was published in 2008 by Shearsman Books in association with Allardyce Books.

Forrest-Thomson died in her sleep on the 26 April 1975 at the age of 27 as the result of accidental overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol. She was married to the writer and academic Jonathan Culler from 1971 to 1974; he is the executor of her literary estate. In 2013, the poet and academic, Gareth Farmer organised the establishment of the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive at Girton College Library, Cambridge.