Colin Spencer

Colin Spencer’s Summer Cooking, 1992, Thorsons, (paperback), ISBN 9780722526538.

He has never stopped painting and writing, and now lives in East Sussex where he is writing the second volume of his autobiography, staring with delight at the Seven Sisters, gardening, and producing the paintings he feels he has striven to create throughout his life – recently described in The Financial Times How to Spend It magazine as "muscular, powerfully envisaged oils", the work of "a remarkable Indian summer".

For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for the Guardian. His column was particularly concerned with exploring current issues and anxieties about food production and manufacture. In 2001 he was described by Germaine Greer as 'the greatest living food writer'.

The Gay Kama Sutra, 1996, B.T. Batsford, ISBN 9780713481099. 1996, Harmony Books, (1st US edition).

Al Fresco A Feast for Outdoor Entertaining, 1987, Thorsons, ISBN 9780722513378.

The New Vegetarian, 1986, Elm Tree Books, ISBN 9780241118948. 1988

Cordon Vert, 52 Vegetarian Gourmet Dinner Party Menus, 1985, Thorsons, ISBN 0722508948/

Colin Spencer's first published non-fiction book (written with Chris Barlas), which appeared in 1984, was a treatise on farting, Reports from Behind, illustrated by Spencer cartoons. His moving account of his affair with the Australian theatre director, John Tasker, Which of Us Two?, was first published by Viking in 1990, and then in a paperback edition by Penguin in 1991. The Faber Book of Food, an anthology, collected and written with Claire Clifton, was published by Faber & Faber in 1994. His interest in sexuality and social attitudes towards it led to the publication of Homosexuality – a History in 1995, and The Gay Kama Sutra in the following year.

A Woman Alone, Feb 1983, performed reading by the RSC at the Pit, Barbican, London

Colin Spencer has been Co-Chairman (1982), Chairman (1988–90) and Vice-President (1990–99) of The Writers Guild of Great Britain and President of the Guild of Food Writers (1994–99). He continues as a judge for the J R Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.

Colin Spencer was born on June 15, 1981 in Manchester, Greater Manchester, England as Colin Paul Spencer.

From early on Colin Spencer's creative instincts were applied to food and cookery, and in 1978 his book Gourmet Cooking for Vegetarians was published. That was followed through the 80s and 90s by a series of other cookery books, totalling 18 in all.

Vandal Rule OK?, 1977, Documentary on vandalism written, narrated and presented by Colin Spencer.

Three comedies: The Trial of St George, a satire on British justice when dealing with sexuality, inspired by the Oz Trial; Why Mrs Neustadter Always Loses, a wry monologue by an American divorcee exiled on a Greek island; and Keep It in the Family, a satire concerning a happy incestuous family (which Colin Spencer also directed) appeared between 1972 and 1978 at the Soho Poly. Interest in his work abroad led to performances of his play The Sphinx Mother, a modern Oedipus, at the Salzburg Festival in 1972, and Lilith, a comedy of surrealist images, at the Schauspielhaus, Vienna in 1979.

His next play to be performed, Spitting Image, also first appeared at Hampstead in October 1968 before moving to The Duke of York's in the West End. The production was directed by James Roose-Evans and starred Derek Fowlds, Frank Middlemass and Lally Bowers. Further productions followed in 1969 off Broadway in New York, in Arnhem, The Netherlands, in Vienna and in Australia. The play concerns a homosexual couple who discover that they are expecting a baby, and society's reaction to this unconventional conception. John Russell Taylor in his book, The Second Wave: British Drama of the Sixties, remarks “for all the play’s cheery light fantastic [it] contains altogether more truth than is quite comfortable." The play was revived in a performance at the Hampstead Theatre in 2009 as part of the celebrations of the theatre’s 50th anniversary.

Seven of Colin Spencer's plays have been performed since the first production in December 1966 at the Hampstead Theatre Club of The Ballad of The False Barman. It was directed by Robin Phillips and featured Caroline Blakiston, Penelope Keith and Michael Pennington. The play is a musical fantasy set in a beach bar run by a bald-headed lesbian "barman" and peopled by whores of various sexes and their clientele, including a transvestite thieving vicar.

That first novel was followed in 1963 by Anarchists in Love the first book of his four-volume novel sequence GENERATION which the author describes as the main core of his work, and “fictionalised autobiography.” Further volumes in the series The Tyranny of Love, Lovers in War and The Victims of Love appeared in 1967, 1969 and 1978. With a Dickensian breadth of characters and social settings, the four volumes follow the saga of the Simpson family from the end of World War I through to the 1960s age of sexual and social experimentation. It focuses in particular on the tortuous search for self-realisation and love by Sundy and Matthew, the two artistically gifted children of the raucously womanising Eddy. The sequence was described by Sir Huw Wheldon as a "work of serious purpose; affecting, hilarious and grave. It is a tapestry of unforgettable characters in all their seaminess and sadness, their idealism and desires."

During his twenties numerous of Colin Spencer's drawings were published in The London Magazine, The Transatlantic Review and Encounter. A series of drawings of writers of our time was published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1959. Those he portrayed included John Betjeman, E.M. Forster, C.P.Snow and his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, Graham Greene, Alan Ross, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, John Lehmann, Stevie Smith, V.S.Naipaul, and John Osborne, among others. An oil portrait of E.M. Forster hung for many years in his rooms at King's College Cambridge. On his death Forster left it to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and it is now in the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh.

Since 1955 Colin Spencer has had nine novels as well as numerous short stories published both in the UK and abroad. His work can be divided into the 4 semi-autobiographical works of the Generation sequence; the two satirical black comedies Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex, and How the Greeks Kidnapped Mrs Nixon (republished in paperback under the title Cock-Up); the sexual realist drama Panic, a compassionate examination of the mentality of a child murderer; the experimental Asylum, merging the myths of Oedipus and the Old Testament Fall of Man into a narrative written in a style akin to poetic prose; and his first novel, set mostly in Vienna, An Absurd Affair, which he feels can be sensibly ignored.

Colin Spencer (born 1933) is an English writer and artist who has produced a prolific body of work in a wide variety of media since his first published short stories and drawings appeared in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22. His work includes novels, short stories, non-fiction (including histories of food and of homosexuality), cookery books, stage and television plays, paintings and drawings, book and magazine illustrations. He has written and presented a television documentary on vandalism, appeared in numerous radio and television programmes and lectured on food history, literature and social issues. For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for The Guardian.