Nancy Cunard collection

Nancy Cunard was born on 10 March 1896 in Nevill Holt, Leicestershire, England, daughter of Sir Bache Cunard and Lady Maud Alice Burke Cunard. She spent her childhood as part of the British upper class on the family estate, surrounded by her parents' literary and artistic friends. When Cunard was fourteen, she moved with her mother to London, and subsequently attended schools in London, Paris and Germany.

Cunard began writing and publishing poetry in the 1910's, and after World War I she settled in Paris, where she became involved in the Dada, Surrealist and Modernist movements. Her first volume of poetry, Outlaws, was published in 1921, followed in 1923 by Sublunary and Parallax in 1925.

In 1927 Cunard founded the Hours Press in an old farmhouse in La Chapelle-Réanville, Normandy. The Press specialized in publishing writers whose works had difficulty finding a home elsewhere, including Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett. The Hours Press closed after four years, after which Cunard became intensely involved in the black civil rights movement in the United States. Driven by her interest in the struggle, she spent several years collecting writings by and about African-Americans, which were published in 1934 in the anthology Negro.

For most of 1936-1939 Cunard lived in Madrid with the poet Pablo Neruda, working as a freelance writer during the Spanish Civil War. She spent most of World War II in London, where she published the anthology Poems for France (1944). After the war, Cunard returned to France to find that the Germans had destroyed or stolen most of her possessions.

Cunard's later publications included Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas (1954), GM: Memories of George Moore (1956) and These Were the Hours (1965), a posthumously published memoir. She died in Paris in 1965.