When Paul Scott was awarded Britain's premier literary award for fiction, the Booker Prize, in 1977 for his last novel, Staying On, it signified belated recognition for a writer who had been producing a distinguished series of novels for twenty-five years, with very little attention from the British literary establishment. His greatest achievement, The Raj Quartet, a tetralogy of interconnected novels, which was followed by a short sequel, Staying On, was published between 1966 and 1977 and brought him the wide following that has steadily grown since his death in 1978. The Raj Quartet provides a unique insight into British and Indian society at the time of Indian independence in 1947, and these powerful, slow-paced novels with their detailed, concrete world pose questions about the nature of the British Empire and of British society that had not been asked since E. M. Forster's A Passage to India in 1924.
Although readers of Scott's novels may feel that the ease and familiarity of his descriptions of the Indian landscape and social scene must suggest a writer who was born in India, they would be mistaken because Paul Scott was born in north London in 1920, the second son of Tom and Frances Scott, both commercial artists.
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