Sir Malcolm Bradbury; Founded School for Writers

Sir Malcolm Bradbury was an educator. And he was a writer.

Which occupation outdid the other was a tossup.

Bradbury, the founder of the University of East Anglia’s creative writing school, which groomed such talents as Ian McEwan, died Monday in Norwich, England, where he lived, taught and wrote. He was 68.

The gifted academic, with a wry satirical view of academia and the world, died of a rare condition known as cryptogenic organizing pneumonia.

Bradbury, seasoned in teaching at the universities of Hull and Birmingham, joined the East Anglia faculty in 1965. Five years later, he began innovating. Big time.

With Angus Wilson, he established England’s most successful creative writing course, which has been called “the cradle for many of the best novelists writing in Britain today.” At a time when the teaching of literature was hidebound in British universities, Bradbury made the subject contemporary.

In addition to McEwan, who won the Booker-McConnell Prize for Fiction in 1998 for “Amsterdam,” and Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Booker for “Remains of the Day” in 1989, Bradbury guided hundreds of other young minds that became influential in the fields of literature, journalism and broadcasting. His classes became synonymous with modern writing in Britain.

Bradbury, who did postgraduate work at Indiana and Yale universities, also taught American studies when most British universities disdained them as a spurious discipline.

“As a writer, I owe him a huge amount,” McEwan said. “I was 21 when I was his student and he was a grand figure even then. . . . He made you feel cleverer than you were and the level of his encouragement was fantastic.”

So dedicated was Bradbury to teaching and mentoring future writers that he wrote fewer novels--only six over the past 40 years--than his reputation might indicate. The final novel, “To the Hermitage,” was published earlier this year, five years after his retirement from the classroom.

Yet his computer was never idle. Bradbury, one journalist observed, “wrote as others breathe.” He wrote about 40 books of literary criticism, essays and learned studies of Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E.M. Forster. He also wrote short stories and a wide range of television scripts for the BBC, earning an international Emmy in 1987 for “Porterhouse Blue.”

“I never tire of writing,” a Bradbury character once said, echoing the author’s own thinking. “That would be like tiring of existing. Writing is everything.”

Of all his prolific output, the novel was his favorite format. He began with “campus” novels, satire on his own kind spiced with academic politics and sex--”Eating People Is Wrong” in 1959, “Stepping Westward” in 1965 and his best-known and finest work, “The History Man,” in 1975.

Known to connoisseurs of literature for deftly pillorying academic pretensions, Bradbury burst into mainstream consciousness when “The History Man” was made into a television miniseries in 1981.

Bradbury’s fourth novel, “Rates of Exchange” in 1983, for which he was short-listed for the Booker Prize, veered from the campus scene to feature a linguistics professor, Dr. Angus Petworth, traveling to a fictitious Eastern Bloc country. Bradbury’s target for satire in that novel is language itself.

With his luggage lost on arrival in “Slaka,” Petworth finds himself, as Bradbury described, with “no meeter, no greeter, no money, no city, no hotel, no food, no bed, no lectures, no professors, no, in a sense, future.”

In reviewing the book for The Times, Elaine Kendall said it was “hilarious and accurate, deepened by the author’s concern for subtle political and social factors.”

Bradbury’s fifth novel was “Doctor Criminale” in 1992, in which another hero travels Europe, researching a documentary about the title character. Times book critic Richard Eder called the novel “richly satiric . . . wonderfully frothy, but quite a bit more.”

The eclectic Bradbury also wrote a popular novella, “Cuts,” in 1987, satirizing the swing of British interests to money and greed in the Margaret Thatcher era.

“In a few pages, Bradbury gives a hilarious, deadly, accurate picture of life in a country that can accommodate a gigantically expensive . . . Royal Wedding with people sleeping in cardboard boxes in the subway,” wrote a Times reviewer.

Bradburn was made a Commander in the British Empire in 1991 and knighted earlier this year.

He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Salt, and two sons, Matthew and Dominic.