Sir John Waller, 7th Baronet

Sir John Stanier Waller, 7th Baronet (27 July 1917 – 22 January 1995) was an English author, poet and journalist. He was one of the group of Cairo poets during World War II

Waller was the son of Captain Stanier Waller and Alice Harris, who was a barmaid before she married. His father died of wounds from the First World War. He was educated at Weymouth College and Worcester College, Oxford. In 1939 Waller founded the magazine Kingdom Come which he edited. He served in the Middle East from 1941 to 1946 and was initially with the Royal Army Service Corps. Then he was posted to the Ministry of Information, where his sergeant-major was the poet G. S. Fraser. During the time in Cairo he founded the Salamander Society with Keith Bullen (poet) and John Cromer and launched Oasis: the Middle East Anthology of Poetry from the Forces in August 1943.

After the war he wrote a number of works - The Merry Ghosts, Crusade, The Kiss of Stars He edited books and was presented with the Greenwood Award for Poetry in 1947 and became FRSL in 1948. He became Information Officer in the Overseas Press Division of the Central Office of Information. In 1954 on the death of Sir Edmund Waller, 6th Baronet, he inherited the baronetcy. However he lost his inherited income as business ventures failed and he gave up writing.

Waller was awarded the Keats Prize in 1974. In 1976 he helped set up the Salamander Oasis Trust. This was originally intended just to reprint Oasis, but Waller suggested collating as much as possible of the material that had not been used, which resulted in four anthologies.

Waller lived in Isleworth, and in 1974 he married Anne Eileen Mileham. The marriage ended in divorce, without children; Lady Waller was declared bankrupt in 1990.

He died at Ventnor, Isle of Wight on 22 January 1995.

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