Background

Howard Newby was born on June 25, 1918 in Crowborough, East Sussex, United Kingdom to working-class parents. His family moved often, mainly in the Midlands and South Wales.

Education

P. H. Newby was educated at Hanley Castle Grammar School in Worcestershire, and St Paul's College of Education (now the University of Gloucestershire).

Career

P. H. Newby was sent to France to serve in World War II as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps in October 1939. His unit was one of the last to be evacuated. Afterward, he was sent to the Middle East and served in the Egyptian desert. He was released from military service in December 1942, and then taught English Literature at King Fouad University (now Cairo University) until 1946. One of his students was the Egyptian editor Mursi Saad El-Din.

Newby was also a distinguished author. His first novel "A Journey into the Interio" was published in 1945. He then returned to England to write. 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. In 1947 he also began writing articles and reviews for The Listener.

P. H. Newby had a distinguished career with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio. From 1949 to 1978 he was a radio producer there and going on to become successively Controller of the Third Programme and Radio Three, Director of Programmes (Radio), and finally Managing Director, BBC Radio.

With Mariner Dances in 1948 Newby published the first of the novels set in the English or Welsh countryside. He continued with this setting through "The Snow Pasture" (1949), "The Young May Moon" (1950) and "A Season in England" (1951), although this last attempts to give dimension to the English experience by an opening section placed in Egypt. This period also saw the bulk of his critical writing; in addition to miscellaneous articles, reviews, and introductions, he published two books of criticism, "Maria Edgeworth" (1950) and "The Novel 1945-1950" (1951).

"A Step to Silence" (1952) and "The Retreat" (1953) are a two-volume unit dealing with the reverberations of the Second World War. The comic trilogy - "The Picnic at Sakkara" (1955), "Revolution and Roses" (1957), and "A Guest and his Going" (1959) – dramatizes the Egyptian question from the waning day of Farouk’s reign to the Sues crisis. In "Ten Miles from Anywhere" (1958) Newby collected a number of short stories that had originally appeared in literary periodicals between 1946 and 1957. The Barbary Light appeared in the spring of 1962, and a comic farce, "One of the Founders", in 1965.

Newby returned to the setting of Egypt in "Something to Answer For" and "Kith" (1977), which the novelist Graham Greene considered Newby’s "best book - more funny & more sad than all the rest".

Newby also wrote two books on Egyptian history: "The Egypt Story" (1979) and "Warrior Pharaohs" (1980), the former illustrated by Watergate photographer Fred J. Maroon. "Saladin in His Time", a biography of the first sultan of Egypt and Syria, was published in 1983.

Achievements

• In 1946 P.H. Newby was given an Atlantic Award in literature, and two years thence he received the Somerset Maugham Prize for "A Journey to the Interior".
  
  Besides, he was the first winner of the Booker Prize in 1969 for his novel "Something to Answer For".
  
  Moreover, he was also turned Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1972.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Saladin in His Time

    (Honored by Christian and Muslim alike, celebrated by Dant...)

    1983
  • Kith

    (On arrival as a medical orderly at Suez in 1941, Faulkes ...)

    1977
  • Warrior Pharaohs

    (Traces the military adventures and territorial expansion ...)

    1980
  • Something to Answer For 1968
  • Spirit of Jem 1967
  • The Picnic at Sakkara 1955
  • One of the Founders 1965
  • Coming in with the Tide 1991
  • Feelings have changed 1981
  • A Journey to the Interior 1945
  • A Season in England 1951
  • The Young May Moon 1950
  • The Novel 1945-1950 1951
  • Maria Edgeworth 1950
  • Agents and Witnesses 1947
  • Revolution and Roses 1957
  • Something about Women 1995
  • Leaning in the Wind 1986
  • A Lot to Ask 1973

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Anthony Thwaite: "P. H. Newby was one of the best English novelists of the second half of the century."

Connections

Howard Newby married Joan Thompson, a baker’s daughter from Wendover, United Kingdom, in 1946. He wrote about the long hair she had when they first met in his short story "The Baker’s Daughter".

Spouse:

Joan Thompson

Student:

Mursi Saad El-Din

Friend:

Anthony Thwaite

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series
• P.H. Newby (Writers and Their Work) The volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.
  1975
• P. H. Newby
  1975