Duncan, Ronald
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Theatre.
(1914-1982) UK author, poet and playwright, Benjamin Britten's librettist for the opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946); he gained some acclaim for his sourly vatic drama and poetry in the 1940s, but became very much an outsider before his death; he was generally not thought of as a genre writer. The Dull Ass's Hoof (coll 1941) contains some fantasy plays. Some of the stories in The Perfect Mistress and Other Stories (coll 1969), A Kettle of Fish (coll 1971), The Tale of Tails (coll 1975) and The Uninvited Guest (coll 1981) are fables with sf components. His sf novella, The Last Adam (1952 chap), features a Last Man who comes across the last woman and, being something of a misogynist, leaves her. He contributed one poem to John Fairfax's Frontier of Going: An Anthology of Space Poetry (anth 1969). [JC]
Ronald Frederick Henry Duncan
born Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe): 9 August 1914
died Barnstaple, Devon: 3 June 1982
works (selected)
- The Dull Ass's Hoof: Three Plays (London: Fortune Press, 1940) [plays: coll: hb/]
- This Way to the Tomb: A Masque and Anti-Masque (London: Faber and Faber, 1946) [play: hb/]
- The Last Adam (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952) [chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Death of Satan: A Comedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1955) [play: hb/]
- The Perfect Mistress and Other Stories (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969) [coll: hb/]
- A Kettle of Fish (London: W H Allen, 1971) [coll: hb/]
- Tale of Tails: Ten Fables (St Germans, Cornwall: Elephant Press, 1975) [coll: hb/]
- The Tale of Tails, and Other Stories (Bideford, Devon: Rebel Press, 1981) [vt of the above: hb/]
- The Uninvited Guest and Other Stories (Bideford, Devon: Rebel Press, 1981) [coll: hb/]
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