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. 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. Stanford described Spark's ousting in Inside the Forties. Spark convinced him of the talent of Dylan Thomas, 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). Stanford died in 2008, aged 90, in Brighton. His widow is the poet Julie Whitby.

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