Peter Vansittart

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Peter Vansittart is a British writer born in 1920. He has had 50 novels published since 1942 and received an OBE in 2008 for his services to literature

[edit] Biography

Peter Vansittart was born in Bedford in 1920 and was educated at Marlborough House School, Haileybury College and Worcester College, Oxford. He is a distant cousin of the late Lord Vansittart, onetime (1930-38) Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He worked as a schoolteacher for 25 years before becoming a full time writer. He has written a novel about this period in his life called “Broken Canes.

Mr. Vansittart’s novels span eras from 2,000 BC to AD 1986. Peter Vansittart has been acclaimed as England’s greatest living historical novelist for several decades. He says of his work, “My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no sign of enjoying them at all. This must be partly due to my obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others.”

In his work, Mr. Vansittart expresses his fascination with how time transforms historical facts into fantasy and myth. He says, “I was long impressed by the woeful distinction between the historical Macbeth and Shakespeare's: by the swift transformation of E.M. Forster's very English Mrs. Moore into an Indian goddess. Such phenomena relate very immediately to my own work, in which myth can be all too real, and the real degenerate into fantasy.”

After living in London for much of his life, Peter Vansittart now lives in Suffolk. His most recent novel, Secret Protocols, is set in World War II. It was published last year and is said by his publishers to be his final novel.