Graham, Winston

(British, 1910–2003)

Graham was born in Manchester, left school at the age of 16, and began writing in the 1930s. Begin with one of his eleven novels portraying the Poldark family in Cornwall in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the first, Ross Poldark (1945), the hero returns from fighting in the American Revolutionary War and meets the abused girl he later marries. The Twisted Sword (1990), the last of the series, finds Ross's son on the field at Waterloo, where leadership is thrust upon him. Marnie (1961), filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, is the story of a wealthy man who marries a kleptomaniac and cures her, but cannot overcome her sexual frigidity. Graham's other books include Tremor (1995), which opens in a luxury hotel in Algeria and focuses on the guests’ reactions to an earthquake.

Bernard Cornwell, E. V. Thompson, Desmond Bagle  DH