William Sansom (William Norman Trevor Sansom) Biography

British short-story writer and novelist, born in Camberwell, London, educated at Uppingham School. He joined the National Fire Service at the outbreak of war and witnessed the bombing raids on London. At the time, he contributed short stories to New Writing and Horizon. Many of the stories in his first collection, Fireman Flower (1944), display documentary realism, while others are in the surreal vein of Kafka. The stories tend to evoke a drab, seedy post-war London, and often reproduce the distortion of perception suffered by those under severe stress. Among other collections of stories are South (1948), The Passionate North (1950), and The Stories of William Sansom (1963), with an introduction by Elizabeth Bowen. His novels include The Body (1949), a tour de force which plunges the reader into the deranged mind of a married middle-aged barber consumed with obsessive jealousy; A Bed of Roses (1954); The Loving Eye (1956); The Cautious Heart (1958); and The Last Hours of Sandra Lee (1961). He also wrote Westminster in War (1947), and the travel books Away to It All (1964) and Grand Tour Today (1968).