Poet, Soldier, Novelist

Robert Graves was born in London in 1895 and was still a teenager when he was commissioned into the trenches of the First World War, an experience so severe that a 1916 report listed him among the dead. His 1929 memoir Good-Bye to All That, written to settle accounts with England after the war and after the breakdown of his first marriage, made his name and remains one of the enduring personal accounts of that conflict. That same year he left England for the Spanish island of Majorca with the poet Laura Riding, an intense and difficult creative partnership that shaped his work through the 1930s, and Majorca remained his home, with a wartime interruption, for the rest of his life.

He supported his poetry, which he considered his true vocation, by writing prose at a formidable pace: the historical novel I, Claudius and its sequel, published in 1934, became his most commercially successful works and were later adapted for television, and he produced translations, further historical fiction and criticism across a bibliography of roughly one hundred forty books. He died in Deia, Majorca, in 1985, having spent his last two decades in declining memory, still locally regarded as the village's presiding poet.