1905-1983. Hungarian author. Imprisoned by
the Nazis in France 1940, he escaped to
England. His novel Darkness at Noon 1941,
regarded as his masterpiece, is a fictional
account of the Stalinist purges, and draws on
his experiences as a prisoner under sentence
of death during the Spanish Civil War. He
also wrote extensively about creativity,
parapsychology, politics, and culture. He
endowed Britain's first chair of
parapsychology at Edinburgh, established in
1984. Born in Budapest, and educated as an
engineer in Vienna, he became a journalist in
Palestine and the USSR. He joined the
Communist party in Berlin 1931, but left it
1938 (he recounts his disillusionment with
communism in The God That Failed 1950). His
account of being held by the Nazis is
contained in Scum of the Earth 1941. Other
novels include Thieves In The Night 1946, The
Lotus and the Robot 1960, and The Call Girls
1972. Nonfiction includes The Yogi and the
Commissar 1945, The Sleepwalkers 1959, The
Act of Creation 1964, The Ghost in the
Machine 1967, The Roots of Coincidence 1972,
The Heel of Achilles 1974, and The Thirteenth
Tribe 1976. Autobiographical works include
Arrow in the Blue 1952 and The Invisible
Writing 1954. He was a member of the
Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and committed
suicide with his wife, after suffering for a
long time from Parkinson's disease.