The Modern Novel

Biography

Colin MacInnes was born in 1914 in London. His father was an Australian professor of music. His mother left his father in 1917, remarried and took the family to Australia. While in Australia she started writing novels under the name Angela Thirkell. She was related to the former prime minister Stanley Baldwin, the pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones and Rudyard Kipling and she and her family were friends with William Morris and James Barrie. MacInnes was brought up in Australia, till he went to Brussels in 1930. In 1935 he studied painting in London but joined the Army at the outbreak of war, serving as a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps. After the war he became a scriptwriter for BBC Radio. He left in the mid-Fifties and continued to support himself for the rest of his life with his writing. He died in 1976.

Books about Colin MacInnes

Tony Gould: Inside Outsider: the Life and Times of Colin MacInnes

Other sites

Colin Macinnes
Macinnes, Colin
Absolute MacInnes