Derek Stanford FRSL (11 October 1918 – 19 December 2008) was a British writer, known as a biographer, essayist and poet.

Educated at Upper Latymer School, Hammersmith, London, he was a conscientious objector during World War II, serving in the Non-Combatant Corps.^[1] He edited Resistance, a poetry magazine of just one issue, with David West in 1946.

For a period in the early 1950s he worked with Muriel Spark on several books, and was a supporter of hers (together with the eccentric poet Hugo Manning, a long-time friend), in the Poetry Society.^[2] Stanford described Spark's ousting in Inside the Forties.

Spark convinced him of the talent of Dylan Thomas,^[3] and Stanford wrote an early book on Thomas shortly after his death. He is associated with the character Hector Bartlett in Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington (1988).^[4]

Stanford died in 2008, aged 90, in Brighton. His widow is the poet Julie Whitby.

• A Romantic Miscellany (1946) editor with John Bayliss
• The Freedom of Poetry: Studies in Contemporary Verse (1947)
• Music for Statues (1948)
• Tribute to Wordsworth: A Miscellany of Opinion for the Centenary of the Poet's Death (1950) editor with Muriel Spark
• Christopher Fry: An Appreciation (1951)
• Christopher Fry Album (1952)
• Emily Brontë: her life and work (1953) with Muriel Spark
• My Best Mary (letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) (1953) editor with Muriel Spark
• Dylan Thomas: a literary study (1954)
• Letters of John Henry Newman (1957) editor with Muriel Spark
• Fenelon's Letters to Men and Women (1957) editor
• Anne Brontë: Her Life And Work (1959) with Ada Harrison
• John Betjeman – A Study (1961)
• Muriel Spark: a Biographical and Critical Study (1963)
• Concealment and Revelation in T. S. Eliot (1965)
• Poets of the 'Nineties. A Biographical Anthology (1965)
• Prose of the Century (1966)
• The Body Of Love: An Anthology of Erotic Verse from Chaucer to Lawrence (1966) editor
• Aubrey Beardsley's Erotic Universe (1967)
• Short Stories of the 'Nineties: A Biographical Anthology (1968) editor
• Movements in English poetry, 1900–1958 (1969)
• Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis: a critical essay (1969)
• Critics of the 'Nineties (1970)
• Writing of the 'Nineties: From Wilde to Beerbohm (1971)
• Pre-Raphaelite Writing (1973) editor
• Three Poets of the Rhymers Club: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson (1974)
• Inside the Forties: literary memoirs, 1937–1957 (1977)
• The Memorare Sequence (1977)
• The Weather Within (1978)
• The Traveller Hears the Strange Machine: Selected Poems 1946–1979 (1980)
• The Vision and Death of Aubrey Beardsley (1985)

• Obituary by James Fergusson in The Independent
• Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Derek Stanford collection, 1938–1979