Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake was a British writer, artist, poet and illustrator who lived from 1911 to 1968. He is best known for the Gormenghast books, four works from what he planned as a longer cycle that his death left unfinished. Critics sometimes compare them with the fiction of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, though Peake's surreal imagination drew more on his early love of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Peake also wrote poetry and nonsense verse, stories for adults and children, plays for stage and radio, and the compact novel Mr Pye, published in 1953. Before this he made his name in the 1930s and 1940s as a painter and illustrator in London, painting portraits of well-known people and, near the end of the Second World War, drawing war scenes for newspapers. Friends and admirers included C. S. Lewis, Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene.