David Daiches was born on 2 September 1912 in Sunderland, England. A literary scholar, his daughter observed that ‘there is no one who has done more than he has to regenerate engagement with Scottish literature’. English Assistant at the University of Edinburgh in 1935, he also taught at Balliol College, Oxford, the University of Chicago, Cornell, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the University of California. In 1961, Daiches was one of the founders of the University of Sussex. He retired as Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh.
President for the Association of Scottish Literary Studies and the Saltire Society, he chaired the panel of judges for the Booker Prize in 1980. During the Second World War, he worked for British Information Services. Notable works include The Place of Meaning in Poetry (1935), The Novel and the Modern World (1939), Virginia Woolf (1942), Two Worlds: an Edinburgh Jewish Childhood (1956), Glasgow (1977), Edinburgh (1978), and A Weekly Scotsman and Other Poems (1994). He edited Studies in English Literature, contributing a critical analysis of Eliot’s Middlemarch (1963).
