P. H. Newby

P. H. Newby
Born (1918-06-25)25 June 1918
Crowborough, England
Died 6 September 1997(1997-09-06) (aged 79)
Garsington, England
Occupation Author, Managing Director of BBC Radio

Percy Howard Newby CBE (25 June 1918 – 6 September 1997) was an English novelist and broadcasting administrator. He was the first winner of the Booker Prize, his novel Something to Answer For having received the inaugural award in 1969.[1]

Early life

P.H. Newby, known as Howard Newby, was born in Crowborough, Sussex on 25 June 1918 and was educated at Hanley Castle Grammar School in Worcestershire, and St Paul's College of Education in Cheltenham. In October 1939 he was sent to France to serve in World War II as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. His unit was one of the last to be evacuated. Afterwards he was sent to the Middle East and served in the Egyptian desert.

Career

Newby was released from military service in December 1942, and then taught English Literature at King Fouad University in Cairo until 1946. One of his students was the Egyptian editor Mursi Saad El-Din.

From 1949 to 1978 he was employed by the BBC, beginning as a radio producer and going on to become successively Controller of the Third Programme and Radio Three, Director of Programmes (Radio), and finally Managing Director, BBC Radio. While at Radio 3, Newby is credited with increasing the amount of Classical music on the station without the need for controversial changes to schedules.

His first novel, A Journey into the Interior, was published in 1946. He then returned to England to write. In the same year he was given an Atlantic Award in literature, and two years thence he received the Somerset Maugham Prize. In 1947, John Lehmann published Newby's boys' adventure story "The Spirit of Jem" with 41 line drawings and a colour dust wrap by Keith Vaughan.

He was awarded a CBE for his work as Managing Director of BBC Radio.

Author, friend and colleague Anthony Thwaite in his obituary[2] states: "P. H. Newby was one of the best English novelists of the second half of the century."

Novels

Non fiction

References

  1. ↑ "Fiction at its Finest". The Man Booker Prize. Retrieved 13 December 2013.
  2. ↑ The Independent, Obituary, 9 September 1997, Retrieved 9 July 2009

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, October 03, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.