PN Review is proud to honour poet, critic, essayist, memoirist, translator, life-model, editor and publisher, Anthony Rudolf, on his eightieth birthday. Rudolf is unique among modern English authors in his ability to move effortlessly between poetry and prose and fiction and non-fiction, yet maintain his unmistakable voice: a voice that can be authoritative and commanding, yet also contemplative, receptive and searching. Proof of his diverse talents is a body of work that includes over forty books, seemingly countless scattered essays and reviews, and extensive correspondences, published and unpublished.

His corpus includes works of fiction; six volumes of minimalistic, philosophically profound poetry; four memoirs (of which the three most recent are centered around his books, objects, possessions and autographs); two critical works on the artist R.B. Kitaj; monographs on his most prized authors and poets (Levi, Oppen, Rawicz and Rosenberg); translations from French (Bonnefoy, Vigée and Jabès), Russian (Tvardovsky, Vinokurov), Hungarian (Heimler) and other languages (Simonovic and Neiger-Fleischmann); edited works (a volume of Jewish poetry, books on Jonathan Griffin, A.C. Jacobs, Keith Bosley and Paul Claudel, among others); and his publication of the diaries of his second cousin Jerzy Feliks Urman, who died at the age of eleven, a victim of the unspeakable violence of the Holocaust.

The two subjects about which Rudolf is most passionate are the atrocities of the Shoah and the Damoclean threat of nuclear war; these were the principal subjects of his much-respected Menard Press, founded in 1969, the catalogue of which includes literary and political texts, works that, ...