James Fenton has worked as a political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent, and columnist. His collections of poetry include A German Requiem (1981); The Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1983 (1983); Out of Danger (1994); and Selected Poems (2006). Fenton is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and served as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1994 to 1999. His lectures on modern English, Irish, and American poets were published as The Strength of Poetry (2001). He wrote art criticism for the New York Review of Books, much of which is collected in Leonardo’s Nephew (1998).

Fenton received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2007, and in 2015 won the PEN Pinter Prize.