Nigel Dennis

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Nigel Forbes Dennis (January 16, 1912–July 19, 1989) was an English writer, critic, playwright and magazine editor.

Born in Surrey, England, Dennis as a child moved with his family to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He would travel to Germany for his education before returning to the UK, where he stayed for four years before settling in the U.S. in 1934. He held jobs at the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, a censorship body; The New Republic, a progressive political journal; and Time. His job at Time returned him to Britain in 1950 (or 1949). Easing into novel writing, in 1949 he published his first acknowledged novel, Boys and Girls Come out to Play (A Sea Change in the USA), which won the Anglo-American novel award for that year (shared with Anthony West). It starts semi-autobiographically, with a depiction of a young man having an epileptic fit, a condition Dennis suffered from all his life. Later in 1955, Dennis published his most notable work, Cards of Identity, a witty psychological satire that gained cult acclaim. The novel was converted into a play the next year. Dennis's career would involve a mixture of non-fiction, novel, criticism, and play writing. Starting in 1961, his book reviews would appear in the Sunday Telegraph for two decades. He began as a contributor for Encounter, a cultural-literary magazine, in 1963, and would eventually become a co-editor before terminating his relationship in 1970.

Dennis's books were few but distinguished; his other works include the novels A Sea Change (1949) and A House in Order (1966), and a short study of Jonathan Swift, which won the Royal Society of Literature award under the W. H. Heinemann bequest in 1966.

According to a letter published in the Guardian in May 2008: "In the 1930s, Dennis wrote Chalk and Cheese under the pseudonym Richard Vaughan. Legend has it that, before publication, every copy was destroyed in an air raid on a warehouse."

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