Judith Kazantzis
One of Lord Longford’s literary children, whose forthright poems rarely spared anyone’s blushes
JUDITH KAZANTZIS, who has died aged 78, was an award-winning poet and activist who cast an unflinching view over domestic life, a woman’s lot, and the global political landscape in the 12 collections she published. Her verse rarely spared anyone’s blushes, even her own. She penned her first poem aged seven, but described the real impulse to write as having begun for her in the early 1970s, “to remedy the despair of a young housebound mother”.
The twin triggers were embracing feminism and finding a Sylvia Plath poem that chimed with her domestic situation. Plath had “unlocked my own tongue”, Judith Kazantzis reported, and was to remain one of her heroes. “She governs me/with her still furious flowering”, she reflected on visiting Plath’s grave.
Writing was in her blood. Her parents were the Anglo-irish Labour cabinet minister and publisher, Lord Longford, and his historian wife, Elizabeth. As the daughter of an earl she could have used the courtesy title, Lady, but resisted it. She was the fourth of eight children; several of her siblings achieved literary acclaim, including the historians, Antonia Fraser and Thomas Pakenham, and the novelist, Rachel Billington.
Politics was part of her make-up, too, both her parents having stood for election to the House of Commons, and she confronted injustice in her verse – as in her 1988 collection, A Poem for Guatemala, which shone a light on US complicity in the genocide against Mayan Indians in that country. It was praised by her brother-inlaw, Harold Pinter, as “beautifully wrought, concrete and passionate”.
Judith Kazantzis was also an anti-war campaigner, marching for CND, joining the Greenham Common women in the 1980s and writing “Hiroshima Day”, an attack on the policy of nuclear deterrence. She also involved herself in party politics, starting in the 1960s as a Labour activist, alongside her first husband, the lawyer Alec Kazantzis.
She wrote in the feminist magazine Spare Rib and contributed a preface to Scars Upon My Heart, Virago’s 1981 anthology of women’s verse from the First World War. “Women poets brought me to poetry,” she said, “and women poets taught me to value what I wrote.”
She was one of the founders of British Writers in Support of Palestine, and her anger at Israeli settlements on the West Bank found expression in “Song of the Bulldozers”: “We are the diggers of Jenin,/we dig and then we bury things./like sofas, fridges, golden rings,/terrorists and little girls.”
By 1999, she had lost faith in the Labour Party and left in protest at the policies of Tony Blair. Her radicalism emerged through other avenues, such as the charity, Kayalaan, which championed migrant domestic workers; and chairing the judges for the Longford Prize, named after her father, which celebrated individuals and organisations involved in prison reform.
Judith Kazantzis was born in Oxford on August 14 1940, during the Battle of Britain. “I was born in war,” she wrote in “Progenitor”, “a day the pilots rampaged and burned in mid-air”. She attended convent school at Mayfield, but likened it to a prison. After thriving at the newly established More House School in London, she read History at Somerville College, Oxford.
Two years after graduating, she married Alec Kazantzis; they had a son and a daughter. She started writing history textbooks – on the Gordon Riots and women’s emancipation – and contributed an approving epilogue in 1964 to her father’s second volume of autobiography, Five Lives.
Her relationship with her parents, and her siblings, was complicated, as she acknowledged in “Minefield”, the title poem of her first collection, published in 1977. In 1984 she returned to matters close to home in Let’s Pretend, charting the ending of her marriage two years before. Professionally, the 1980s were good years. “Freight Song” was among the first works to be featured in London Transport’s Poems on the Underground project launched in 1986.
She had been writing short stories for magazines, including Critical Quarterly, but in 2002 achieved a long-cherished goal by publishing her only novel, Of Love and Terror, a three-generational saga of women caught up in wars. The collection Just After Midnight (2004) was dedicated to her mother, who had died two years previously. The focus in her autumnal works switched to more traditional themes, such as nature, but Kazantzis – a selfdescribed “gadfly poet against injustice” – added an outspoken environmentalism.
In 1988 she had married the American thriller writer Irving Weinman; he died in 2015. They spent part of the year in Key West, Florida, where he taught, the rest in Lewes, Sussex. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Sussex in 2006 and the next year received the Society of Authors’ Cholmondeley Award.
Judith Kazantzis is survived by her children and a stepdaughter and stepson.
Judith Kazantzis, born August 14 1940, died September 18 2018