Plomer, William (Charles Franklyn) (1903–1973)

English novelist and poet, born in South Africa. His first novel, the manic Turbott Wolfe, which was written when he was 19 and published in 1926, caused such a sensation for its satirizing of South African racism and its advocating of miscegenation that Plomer left South Africa. He spent three years in Japan, an experience reflected in his novel Sado (1931). Settling in London in 1929, he became chief reader for publisher Jonathan Cape and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, especially modern ballads, character sketches, and reflective poems about Africa; he published ten volumes of verse, and his Collected Poems appeared in 1973 in an enlarged edition. He also wrote librettos for Benjamin Britten and produced two volumes of autobiography, Double Lives (1943) and At Home (1958).

He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and made a CBE, in 1968.