Roland Camberton

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Roland Camberton was a British writer. He won the 1951 Somerset Maugham Award, given to authors under the age of 35, for his novel Scamp. The book had earlier received a merciless review in the Times Literary Supplement upon publication in late 1950:

The book is written from the standpoint of the "bum": that bearded and corduroyed figure who may be seen crouching over a half of bitter in the corner of a Bloomsbury "pub"; it is ostensibly concerned with the rise and fall of a short-lived literary review, but Mr. Camberton, who appears to be devoid of any narrative gift, makes this an excuse for dragging in disconnectedly and to little apparent purpose a series of thinly disguised local or literary celebrities. (TLS review by James Maclaren Ross, dated November 10, 1950)

The following year, he published Rain on the Pavements. A novel about Jewish life in Hackney during the thirties, this book received a much more positive review (this one from Julian Symons). Oddly enough, Camberton then vanished off the literary map. He does not appear to have published any books after 1951. Indeed, few details of his life are available, and there is no mention of him whatsoever in the Times archives. The writer Iain Sinclair has described him in an interview as a "Hackney writer".