Simon Arthur Noel Raven was an English author, playwright, essayist, television writer, and screenwriter.
13 Facts About Simon Raven
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Simon Raven is known for his louche lifestyle as much as for his literary output.
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Simon Raven's mother Esther, nee Christmas, a baker's daughter, was a distance and cross-country athlete who represented England against France in March 1932.
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Simon Raven was educated first at Cordwalles preparatory school near Camberley, Surrey, then as a scholarship pupil at Charterhouse, whence he was expelled in 1945 for homosexual activities.
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Simon Raven's intelligence garnered him only an upper second, a degree which would not normally have gained him a studentship to read for a doctorate.
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Simon Raven was awarded a studentship to study the influence of the classics in Victorian schooling, but this soon gave way to pleasure-seeking and his thesis was never seriously addressed.
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Simon Raven wrote a novel, which proved unpublishable because of its libellous nature, and only emerged almost 30 years later as An Inch of Fortune.
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Simon Raven was commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, before being seconded to the 77th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery at Rollestone Balloon Camp in Wiltshire, where he saw out his service.
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Simon Raven was at various times compared with Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell and Lawrence Durrell, but his voice was his own: "Raven came nearer than other novelists to exposing, in the grandeur of its squalor and the dubiety of its standards, the times he lived in and saw through".
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Simon Raven had a fascination for the supernatural, first manifested in his early novel Doctors Wear Scarlet, which features Balkan vampires and was cited by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the thirteen best supernatural novels.
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Simon Raven spent what he earned, and after 34 years in Kent at Blond's behest he finally moved to London on securing lodgings in the London Charterhouse, the almshouse historically associated with Charterhouse School.
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Simon Raven's health continued to fail and after a series of strokes he died in London on 12 May 2001, aged 73.
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Simon Raven wrote features and articles for: The Listener; Encounter; London Magazine; Spectator; New Statesman and other magazines and journals.