Richard Hughes was born in 1900 and educated at Chaterhouse School and Oriel College, Oxford. A highly original and idiosyncratic writer, he wrote poems and plays as well as novels, but it is for these that he is best remembered, the most famous of which was his first, A High Wind in Jamaica, published in 1929. A remarkable man, he could number Masefield, Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Augustus John and Dylan Thomas amongst his friends and acquaintances. Married to the painter Frances Bazley in 1932, he died in 1976.