Author

Norman Lewis

Norman Lewis was born in 1908. His early childhood was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents on the edge of north London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales. Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography to finance travels in Spain, Italy, Morocco and the Balkans and was later recruited by the intelligence services to work for them in Yemen. During the Second World War he spent three years in the Intelligence Corps in North Africa and Southern Italy. His diaries from that time later became his masterpiece, Naples ’44. Before the war, he had published two books, but his literary career only took off with the publication of A Dragon Apparentin 1951. Over the following decades he wrote thirty books, half of them novels. In the year of its publication, an omnibus translation of his novels into Russian outsold Tolstoy,but he regarded his life's major achievement to be the reaction to an article written by him entitled Genocide in Brazil, published in The Sunday Times in 1968. This led to a change in Brazilian law and to the formation of Survival International, the international organisation which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples. Even into his nineties Lewis was enthusiastically travelling to off-beat parts of the world. He died in 2003.