Mervyn Peake |
About Mervyn Peake
An Interview with Mervyn Peake
More About Mervyn Peake
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Mervyn Peake was born in Kuling, China, in 1911, and came to England in 1923. He was educated at Tientsin Grammar School and Eltham College, Kent. He studied art at the Royal Academy Schools, where he was considered the most outstanding student of his day. His first book of poems, Shapes and Sounds, was published in 1941. At the end of the Second World War, commissioned as an official artist, he was sent to record the devastation of Germany. During this time he also wrote some of his finest poetry.
Mervyn Peake is perhaps best known for his Titus books - Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) - which are considered to be one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. He also wrote Rhymes Without Reason (1944), Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1945), The Craft of the Lead Pencil (1946), Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948), Mr Pye (1953), The Wit to Woo (1957), a play, and The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962). He illustrated several classics, notably The Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island and The Hunting of the Snark. For his novel Gormenghast and his poem The Glassblowers Mervyn Peake was awarded the W. H. Heinemann Foundation Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in 1950, and was made a Fellow in 1951. He died in 1968.
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