Author Biography

Paul Scott was born in suburban North London in March 1920. At the outbreak of WWII, he enlisted as a private which saw him sent to India as a supply officer in 1943. He served in India and Malaya (1943-1946) and while there he wrote poetry and drama. After a period of time as a bookkeeper he became a literary agent and published a string of novels concerned with British military figures on duty in foreign lands. He began writing full time in 1960 and completed The Raj Quartet in 1974. In 1977 Staying On won the Booker Prize for Fiction. He spent his final years travelling between his Hampstead home and the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma where he was a visiting fellow. He died in 1978.

Instead of returning “home” when he retired, Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, and his wife Lily chose to remain in the small hill town of Pangkot with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire.