He quickly came down with amoebic dysentery, not diagnosed until 1964. In 1943, at the age of 22, Scott was posted as a commissioned officer in India, and he sailed on the Athlone Castle from Liverpool that year. He had been initially appalled by what he found on the subcontinent-by the heat, dust, poverty, disease, and overcrowding, above all by the imperial attitudes of the British-but over the next three years he fell deeply in love with India. He trained as a private in Torquay with the 8th Battalion, 'The Buffs.' During this time two of his aunts were killed in an air raid. Scott was conscripted into the British Army as a private soldier early in 1940, with the British Intelligence Department. He later noted that the rigid social hierarchies and codes of his suburban childhood he found echoed in British Indian society.

Payne and took evening classes in book-keeping and wrote poetry in his spare time. This division from his studies was mirrored through the rest of his life-the battle between the demands of practical needs versus the urge to create. Scott was educated at the private Winchmore Hill Collegiate School, but had to leave early, without any qualifications, as his father's business met financial difficulties. In later life Scott noted the tension in himself between the pull of his mother's creative ambition and his father's real world, grounded approach to life.

Scott's mother, Frances, née Mark (1886–1969) was the daughter of a labourer from south London. He was a commercial artist, specialising in drawing for calendars and cards. His father, Thomas (1870–1958), was a Yorkshireman who moved to London in the 1920s with family members from Headingley. Paul Scott was born at 130 Fox Lane in the district of Palmers Green/Southgate, in North London, the younger of two sons. In the final years of his life he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Tulsa, where much of his private archive is held.

From the material gathered he created the novels that would become The Raj Quartet.

In 1964 he returned to India for a research trip, though he was struggling with ill health and alcoholism. On return to London he worked as a notable literary agent, before deciding to write full time from 1960. The series of books was dramatised by Granada Television during the 1980s and won Scott the public and critical acclaim that he had not received during his lifetime.īorn in suburban London, Scott was posted to India, Burma and Malaya during World War II. In the last years of his life, his novel Staying On won the Booker Prize (1977). Paul Mark Scott (25 March 1920 – 1 March 1978) was an English novelist best known for his tetralogy The Raj Quartet.

The raj quartet