Linklater, Eric Robert Russell (1899–1975)

Scottish novelist and biographer. Juan in America (1931) helped to establish his reputation as a humorous, zestful, and inventive writer. It was followed by Juan in China (1937), The Impregnable Women (1938), Private Angelo (1946), and other novels. He also wrote the biographies Mary Queen of Scots (1933) and Robert the Bruce (1934), and produced plays for the stage and for broadcasting. His book for children, The Wind in the Moon (1944), won the Carnegie prize.

Among his later books are the novels The Dark of Summer (1956) and A Man Over Forty (1963), and a travel book A Year of Space (1953).

Linklater was born in Dounby, Orkney, and was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University. He served in World War I and was invalided out 1918. After the war he studied medicine but left this to take a degree in English literature in 1925. He then went to India, where he was for two years assistant editor of the Times of India. He returned to become lecturer in English literature at Aberdeen, 1927–28. He published two novels in 1929: White Man's Saga and Poet's Pub, and then went to the USA as Commonwealth fellow. His impressions of the USA were wittily, and sometimes unkindly, fictionalized in Juan in America. During World War II he served in the public relations department of the War Office.