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On the Beach | Author Biography

Bora Nevil Shute Norway, Shute was born on January 17, 1899, in a suburb of London, England. His father, Arthur Hamilton Norway, was the assistant secretary of the General Post Office in London. In 1912 his father was appointed head of the post office in Ireland. After moving to Dublin, Shute was sent to the Shrewsbury School in Oxford; in the summer, he stayed with his family in the countryside near Dublin.

Nevil Shute and Scottish ballerina Moira Shearer autograph books at Harrod's, London.
Nevil Shute and Scottish ballerina Moira Shearer autograph books at Harrod's, London.

In 1915, Shute's only brother, nineteen-year-old Fred, died in France during World War I. A short time later, Shute served as a stretcher-bearer during the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland. During the fighting, Irish rebels occupied and burned his father's post office. He entered the Royal Military Academy and trained for several months to become a gunnery officer for the Royal Flying Corps, but a childhood stammer prevented him from getting a commission. Desperate to fight for England, he enlisted in the infantry, but the war ended before he saw any combat.

After graduating from Oxford in 1923, he worked at the de Havilland Aircraft Company. At this time he wrote his first novel, Stephen Morris, which wasn't published until after his death. His first published novel was Marazan, which appeared in 1926.

He eventually left de Havilland's to work on the R-100 airship project. The R-100 was one-half of a two-airship project commissioned by the government. Although the R-100 flew a successful round-trip to Canada, the government version of the aircraft—known as the R-101—was poorly designed and crashed in an accident over France during its first flight. The project was canceled, and Shute went on to form his own company, Airspeed Ltd., in 1930.

Shute married Frances Heaton in 1931. After publishing his third novel, Lonely Road (1932), he stopped writing to focus his attention on his new company.

In 1938 Shute resigned from Airspeed Ltd. and began writing again. With the advent of World War II he joined the British Navy and was appointed head of the engineering section at the Admiralty Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development. He went with the invasion fleet to Normandy on D-Day as a correspondent for the Ministry of Information.

After the war, Shute spent the next several years traveling. In 1945 he was a correspondent in Burma, and a few years later, he toured America by automobile in 1947. A few years later he flew his own airplane to Australia, which provided him with the subject matter for A Town Like Alice and Round the Bend (1951). In 1950 he moved to Australia.

Shute's later books were influenced by his growing interest in Eastern mysticism. He wrote and traveled extensively in the last decade of his life. In 1958 he had a major stroke. Only a year later he suffered a second one, but he was still able to complete his last novel, Trustee from the Toolroom (1960). On January 12, 1960, Shute fell ill while writing in his study. He died later that evening.