About the Author

Dan Davin (1913-1990) looms large in New Zealand literary & military history. Novelist, short story writer, literary critic and influential academic publisher at Oxford University Press, he was born in Invercargill and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1936. In the Second World War he fought with the New Zealand expeditionary force, writing as a result the highly regarded Crete volume in the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War. Much of his post-war life was devoted to the Oxford University Press where he ended up as deputy secretary and academic publisher. He wrote seven novels as well as collections of short stories & a highly-regarded volume of memoirs of fellow writers, CLOSING TIMES. For thirty years, Davin was recognised in Britain as the informal ambassador of New Zealand letters, and his friendships, connections and reviews in the TLS did much to bring New Zealand writers to a larger public.