Peter Vansittart

Peter Vansittart (27 August 1920 - 4 October 2008) was a British writer. He had 50 novels published between 1942 and 2008, and received an OBE in 2008 for his services to literature. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/7163271.stm ]

Vansittart was born in Bedford in 1920 and was educated at Marlborough House School, Haileybury College and Worcester College, Oxford. He was 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 wrote a novel about this period in his life called “Broken Canes. [http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4801/Vansittart-Peter.html ]

Vansittart’s novels span eras from 2,000 BC to AD 1986. He was acclaimed as England’s greatest living historical novelist for several decades. He said 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.” [http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/vansitrt.htm ]

In his works, Vansittart expressed his fascination with how time transforms historical facts into fantasy and myth. He said, “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 moved to Suffolk. His most recent novel, Secret Protocols, is set in World War II. It was published last year and was his final novel.

Peter Vansittart died on October 4th, 2008 at Ipswich Hospital aged 88. [http://www.legacy.com/timesonline-uk/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=118549993 ]

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