Urquhart, Fred, 1912-1995

Frederick Burrows Urquhart was born on July 12, 1912, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is acknowledged as both a novelist and short story writer, but achieved recognition from his short stories. Urquhart also spent time editing and reviewing books. The constant theme of his stories centers upon the lives of ordinary people, especially violence and cruelty towards women.

His education took place in village schools in Scotland until 1927, when at fifteen he left school to work for a bookshop in Edinburgh. During this time he began to write his first novel. He left the bookstore to concentrate on his writing in 1935, and by 1938 this novel, Time Will Knit, was published. Because he was a declared pacifist, at the outbreak of World War II he was sent to work on the land. At this time, his first collection of short stories, I Fell for a Sailor ( 1940 ), was published, followed by his second collection of stories, The Clouds Are Big with Mercy ( 1946 ), and his two later novels, The Ferret Was Abraham’s Daughter ( 1949 ) and Jezebel’s Dust ( 1951 ). Further volumes of stories include The Year of the Short Corn ( 1949 ), The Last Sister ( 1950 ), The Laundry Girl and the People ( 1955 ), The Dying Stallion ( 1967 ), and The Ploughing Match ( 1968 ). His final works were the novel Palace of Green Days ( 1979 ), which drew upon his childhood in Perthshire where his father worked as a chauffeur, and a collection of short stories, A Diver in China Seas ( 1980 ).

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