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 poetic eccentric , a long-term friend), in the Poetry Society. Stanford described Spark's ousting in Inside the Forties.