Paul Scott

Scott was born in Southgate, north London, in 1920 and served in India and Malaya during the Second World War as an officer in the Indian Army, an experience of empire's final years that became the fixed subject of his fiction.

After the war he worked for years in publishing and as a literary agent, representing writers including Muriel Spark, before turning to full-time writing. His major achievement, the four-novel Raj Quartet (1966–1975), reconstructed British India's last years through multiple perspectives converging on a single rape case and its long, unresolved reverberations.

Staying On (1977) returned to two minor Quartet characters, Tusker and Lucy Smalley, a retired colonel and his wife who stayed behind in a Himalayan hill station after independence, forgotten by the country and empire that once defined them; it won the Booker Prize in 1977, months before Scott died of cancer in early 1978.