Nicholas Monsarrat (Nicholas John Turney Monsarrat) Biography

English novelist, born in Liverpool, educated at Winchester and at Trinity College, Cambridge. His early childhood was spent on Merseyside, but it was at the family country home in Anglesey that he developed his love of the sea and sailing which he was subsequently to employ to such fruitful effect in his fiction. His novels of the 1930s include This is the Schoolroom (1938). During the Second World War, he responded to an advertisement for ‘gentlemen with yachting experience’ to join the Royal Naval Volunteer Force, and within weeks was on a corvette in the Atlantic. This experience formed the background to his bestseller The Cruel Sea (1951), a vivid account of midocean life during war-time. Though he held various public offices after the war, he could now afford to devote himself to writing. A stream of books appeared, the most memorable of which are The Kapillan of Malta (1973) and The Master Mariner (two volumes, 1978 and 1980, unfinished). Monsarrat also published two volumes of autobiography (1966, 1970).