Denys Val Baker - Career

Career

Denys showed an interest in writing from when a young man. He was particularly drawn to the short story format, which was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and he would send stories to many magazines. Thanks to his father’s contacts with the Harmsworth family, Denys managed to get a job as a reporter on the Derby Evening Telegraph, one of the Harmsworth family’s regional titles, and stayed there for three years. After that he moved to London where he worked as a jobbing journalist on various trade papers.

He was by now beginning to supplement his income through freelance journalism and sales of short stories to the many literary magazines that were popular in the days before television. He had by this time changed his writing surname to Val Baker in honour of his father, who had died in a flying accident in 1942.

Denys Val Baker started publishing his own quarterly magazine Opus, (later to be renamed Voices) in the early forties featuring stories, poems and reviews by his contemporaries- many of whom went on to be well-known writers. In 1943 he produced the first of his annual Little Reviews Anthologies through Allen & Unwin, which presented the best of that year's output from the country’s many literary magazines. There were also a series of anthologies of short stories by British and international writers.

As a writer of fiction his career really started with Selected Stories, which was a little stapled paperback issued in 1944. This was quickly followed by Worlds Without End, a hardback published in 1945, and then his first novel The White Rock in the same year. The latter was also published in U.S. and Holland. A second novel The More We Are Together soon followed and then a third The Widening Mirror in 1949.

Denys was also increasing his output of short stories, many of which were not only published in magazines, but also read on the BBC’s Morning Story programme. Over the years, he had well over 100 stories read on the BBC radio.

Denys had always been enchanted by Cornwall, and he eventually moved there permanently to St.Ives in 1948. This change was to mark a new era in his writing career. While continuing to write short stories, he also launched the publication The Cornish Review in 1949.

The Cornish Review featured poems, short stories, articles, art and book reviews. This quarterly magazine lasted three years and ten issues. In 1966 Val Baker revived the Review with much the same mixture, this time it lasted for twenty six issues until it folded in 1974.

In 1959 he published the acclaimed Britain's Art Colony By The Sea about the artistic community of Cornwall, and particularly based around St. Ives. Denys lived in various places in Cornwall as his family kept growing. The family life in Corwall was to provide the basis for many autobiographical, humorous books. The first of which, The Sea’s in The Kitchen, was published in 1962 by Phoenix House and was to be his best selling book since the forties. This was soon followed by The Door is Always Open in 1963 and eventually by another twenty four .

Another aspect of his life was his interest in the sea. When Denys purchased his own boat, M.F.V. Sanu, an ex-navy supply tender, it was an inspiration for his books, short stories, and magazine articles.

In the 1960s and 1970s he continued with a prolific creative output, mainly through the publisher William Kimber. But finally, in the early eighties onwards Val Baker’s health began to deteriorate and he suffered excruciating pain from irritable bowel syndrome, an illness that seems to have practically curtailed his writing career.

On 6 July 1984 Denys Val Baker died at The West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance at the early age of sixty six. He had written fourteen novels, twenty two collections of short stories, twenty six autobiographies, over forty anthologies, another twenty books on general subjects as well as hundreds of short stories and articles for magazines throughout the world. The popularity of his books was reinforced when with the introduction of Public Lending Rights in the year of his death the royalties put him in the top 120 of most borrowed authors of over 6000 who had registered.