Paul Scott

Paul Scott was an English novelist born in London in 1920. After leaving school early, he worked as an accounts clerk before serving in the British Army during the Second World War. Posted to India as an officer in the Indian Army Service Corps, he also served in Burma and Malaya, experiences that established his lasting interest in British India and the relationships between colonisers and colonised people. After the war, Scott worked as a literary agent before becoming a full-time novelist. He died in London in 1978.

Scott is best known for The Raj Quartet: The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils. Set during the final years of British rule in India, the sequence examines racial prejudice, nationalism, political imprisonment, wartime uncertainty and the collapse of imperial authority through a large cast of British and Indian characters. Its companion novel, Staying On, follows an elderly British couple who remain in India after independence and won the 1977 Booker Prize. Scott’s fiction is particularly valuable for its critical treatment of the British Raj and its attention to the personal consequences of empire, class and cultural division.