Winner of the Hatchards & Biographers' Club First Biography Prize

'With this meticulously researched biography, we don't so much move closer as move in with Gunn and shadow him through his life . . . Gunn's life is chronicled beautifully here.' Andrew McMillan, Literary Review

'A consummately researched, intelligent and sympathetic biography - and, which matters most, he's a very good reader of the poems.' Sam Leith, Guardian

'A fine, frank biography.' Peter Conrad, Observer

'Admirably unsentimental . . . allowing all Gunn's complexities and contradictions to emerge unvarnished . . . the greatness of his poetry endures.' Daily Telegraph

'The first biography of Thom Gunn, and likely the definitive one . . . Nott's book is one of the best versions of a gay relationship conducted over this half century.' Colm Toibin

'Nott has set out here to produce a work sturdy enough to support decades of future commentary on Gunn. He's succeeded - this book is everything you ever wanted to know about Thom Gunn but had not even thought about asking.' New York Times Book Review

The eagerly awaited, no-holds-barred biography of the great poet: an intellectual maverick, sexual rebel and icon of queer literature.

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a landmark study of one of England's - and America's - most innovative and revolutionary poets. Michael Nott chronicles, for the first time, Gunn's largely undocumented life: his childhood in Kent and London, his mother's suicide, and his mind-opening education at Cambridge, where he read Shakespeare and John Donne, wrote his first book, Fighting Terms, and met the man who was to become his life partner - Mike Kitay.

In his mid-twenties, Gunn followed Kitay to America and became one of the great poet-documenters of San Francisco's queer culture, capturing both the hippie menta