Robert Nye Biography

British novelist and poet, born in London, educated in Surrey and Essex; he left school at 16. He began to publish his poems as early as 1961. A Collection of Poems 1955–1989 appeared in 1989, and Collected Poems in 1995. Nye was poetry editor of the Scotsman from 1967 and of The Times from 1971. His first novel, Doubtfire (1967), was followed by Tales I Told My Mother (1969), a collection of stories inspired by the actual lives of literary figures; the device of reworking extant stories, historical or legendary, has been adopted by Nye in subsequent novels. These include Falstaff (1976), Merlin (1979), and Faust (1980), which focus on these quasi-mythical figures; The Voyage of Destiny (1982), The Memoirs of Lord Byron (1989), The Life and Death of My Lord Gilles de Rais (1990), and Mrs Shakespeare (1992), all of which are historical. Nye explores the iconic power of these figures in the popular cultural imagination, often from the perspective of peripheral figures. His novels combine a historian's researched erudition with a raconteur's earthy humour and a fantasist's ability to evoke the ineffable.