J. F. Hendry was born James Hendry in Glasgow, 1912, later adding Findley to his name in recognition of his mother’s side of the family. She was a church organist while his father was a butcher. He taught himself Russian but dropped out of university, travelling widely, teaching and translating Switzerland and in Austria. He married Theodora Ussai, a Yugoslavian, but she was killed in London during the Blitz. Before she died, the couple had edited The Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories (1943), a collection that proved very popular and is still in print.
Living and working in Leeds, Hendry became a conscientious objector before serving in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. After the war, he continued to work as a translator, including for the UN and the International Labour Organisation. With Henry Treece, he was one of the founders of the movement known as the New Apocalyptics, who used his flat as their headquarters. They were later joined by G. S. Fraser and Norman MacCaig, and Hendry was involved in the editing of all the movement’s three anthologies (The New Apocalypse, 1939, The White Horseman, 1941 and The Crown and Sickle, 1944).
His own poetry collections include The Bombed Happiness (1942) and The Orchestral Mountain (1943), which describes the abject details and Hendry’s distress of the bombsite where his first wife had died. He did not publish another collection of poetry for many years.
During the 1960s, Hendry became chairman of the Department of Modern Languages and Head of the School of Translating at the University of Laurentian in Canada.
Later in life, he returned to his own writing, both new and previously unfinished. Some of his unpublished poetry was published in a memorial edition of Chapman after his death, while much of his prose remains unpublished.