Paul Scott

Paul Mark Scott was an English novelist, playwright, and poet, best known for his tetralogy The Raj Quartet. His novel Staying On won the Booker Prize for 1977. Paul Scott was born in Palmers Green, in Southgate, London, then in Middlesex, the younger of two sons. His father, Thomas (1870-1958), was a Yorkshireman who moved to London in the 1920s as a commercial artist specializing in furs and lingerie.

Only The Towers of Silence and Staying On achieved some success with the award of the Yorkshire Post Fiction Award and the Booker Prize in 1971 and 1977 respectively. Scott was too ill to attend the Booker presentation in November 1977. Soon after its publication and while he was in Tulsa, Scott was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died at the Middlesex Hospital, London, on 1 March 1978.