David Pownall's career as a novelist began in 1974. At the same time, he was becoming known as a prolific writer for fringe and provincial theater, as well as for radio, and he remains better known as a dramatist than as a novelist. Three of his novels, The Raining Tree War (1974), African Horse (1975), and Beloved Latitudes (1981), are set in Africa, where he lived for six years in the 1960s. God Perkins (1977) concerns a theater company. Light on a Honeycomb (1978), less well received than his other books, was puzzling to critics. Pownall's novels are short and quick moving, marked by farce, extravagance, and inventiveness. His true place among contemporary novelists is yet to be defined and secured, with Beloved Latitudes the most seriously intended work.
Pownall, the son of a docker, was born in Liverpool in 1938. He went to public school (Lord Wandsworth College, Hampton) on a scholarship for war orphans; he says that in his teens he could not reason his way through to the values of this more advantaged world.
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