Nevil Shute Norway was born in London in 1899. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in engineering in 1922 and began working as an aeronautical engineer.

The first of his 24 novels, Marazan, was published in 1926 and these two very separate careers flourished in tandem until he ceased work in 1938 to write full-time. As a Naval Volunteer Reservist in the Second World War, Shute developed anti-submarine missiles and was sent to Normandy to chronicle the D-Day landings.

In 1945 he emigrated to Australia with his wife and daughters and there wrote perhaps his most famous novels - A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957). He died in Melbourne in 1960.