Denys Val Baker Writer

Novelist, Short-Story Writer, and Family Biographer

I first came across Denys Val Baker when I heard one of his short stories read on the car radio back in the ‘70s. Although I can’t remember which story it was, what I do remember is the effect it had on me, causing me to pull over and listen.

Back home I realised I had read his work, or at least, the work of others gathered together under his name as an editor, whose introductions to others stories were scholarly gems that filled me with his own passion for writers and places.

At the time of hearing his story I was living in Plymouth and taking every opportunity to explore Cornwall, and it was in a second hand bookshop in St. Ives that I discovered a handful of Denys’ family autobiographies from the 1960s. Those books were a revelation to me: their simplicity of style (very hard to achieve), as if the reader is listening to Denys talking at his kitchen table. They were also very funny, and in the early 1960s heralded something of a new literary genre.

Over the years I’ve continued to collect many of Denys’ titles in second-hand book shops far and wide — they continue to fetch high prices — but became extremely frustrated that all of his titles (with exception of Britain’s Art Colony by the Sea), which were good earners for the publishers in their day (one of his early novels…