Our friend Andrew Kennedy, who has died aged 85, was an academic and writer keen to share his love of literature with students and colleagues. For him what really mattered in life were writing and creativity.
He was born Kárpáti Andor Ödön – with his surname first, in Hungarian style – in Győr in western Hungary. He spent his childhood in Debrecen, where his father was a bank manager. Dark shadows stole across his life in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded Hungary. With his parents, Elemér Kárpáti and Edit (nee Szántó) and his sister, Eva, he was deported to a labour camp on the outskirts of Vienna. There his father died, but he, his mother and Eva survived. Andrew’s retelling of his harrowing journey on the deportation train was published in the Observer in 1961 around the time of the Adolf Eichmann trial for crimes against humanity.
After the end of the second world war he resumed his studies in Debrecen and then briefly in Budapest, where he became an avid theatregoer, attending as many performances of plays and operas as a schoolboy could afford.
In the autumn of 1947, he moved to Britain, to stay with his uncle and continue his education, culminating in a degree in English literature from Bristol University. In 1956 he took up a job with the BBC Monitoring Service on the Hungarian desk. In the 1950s he started using the name Andrew Kennedy, and changed his name officially in 1958. While in London he met Judith Edmundson Hall, whom he married in 1958.
He taught English at a boys’ school in Scarborough and then in Cambridge, at a language school. His first university post was as a lecturer in the University of Bergen in 1966 and he taught in Norway for 30 years. He became professor of British literature at Bergen in 1990. He was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, (1979-80), and subsequently became a life member of the college.
Andrew’s ruling passion was an intellectual fascination with language, especially in drama. Highlights from his literary legacy are Six Dramatists in Search of a Language (1975), in which he analysed the language in plays by Shaw, Eliot, Beckett, Pinter, Osborne and Arden, and his book Samuel Beckett (1989).
When he retired from the academic world in 2001, Andrew looked back on his early years in a literary memoir, Chance Survivor (2012). Writing about the book in PN Review, Yudit Kiss pinpointed the “emotional archaeology … involved in digging out that little boy from under the ruins of his destroyed world”.
Judith died in 1992. Andrew is survived by his children, Veronica and Nicholas, and four grandchildren.
