Peake , Mervyn , 1911-1968 , poet and novelist

Mervyn Peake was born in China on 9 July 1911. He attended Tientsin Grammar School and Eltham College, Kent. He became a poet, novelist, painter, playwright and illustrator. He married Maeve Gilmore, an artist, in 1937 and had two sons and one daughter. Peake died on 17 November 1968. Publications include: Rhymes Without Reason (1944); Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1945, reprinted 1966); The Craft of the Lead Pencil (1946); Titus Groan (novel, 1946); Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948); The Glassblowers (poem) and Gormenghast (novel), awarded the W H Heinemann Foundation Prize, Royal Society of Literature (1950); Mr Pye (1953); The Wit to Woo (play, 1957); Titus Alone (novel, 1959); The Rime of the Flying Bomb (1962); Titus Groan (novel, reprinted as trilogy in UK and USA, 1967); A Reverie of Bone (poems, 1967).

Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904. Following graduation from Oxford he joined the staff of The Times newspaper in 1926, became literary editor of The Spectator in 1940, and during the war worked in the Foreign Office. He was Director of the publishers Eyre & Spottiswoode from 1944 to 1948 and of Bodley Head publishers from 1958 to 1968.