Paul Mark Scott (25 March 1920 1 March 1978) was an English novelist best known for his tetralogy The Raj Quartet. In the last years of his life, his novel Staying On won the Booker Prize (1977). The series of books was dramatised by Granada Television during the 1980s and won Scott the public and critical acclaim that he had not received during his lifetime. Born in suburban London, Scott was posted to India, Burma and Malaya during World War II. On return to London he worked as a notable literary agent, before deciding to write full time from 1960. In 1964 he returned to India for a research trip, though he was struggling with ill health and alcoholism. From the material gathered he created the novels that would become The Raj Quartet. In the final years of his life he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Tulsa, where much of his private archive is held. Early life Paul Scott was born at 130 Fox Lane in the district of Palmers Green/Southgate, in North London, the younger of two sons. His father, Thomas (1870–1958), was a Yorkshireman who moved to London in the 1920s with family members from Headingley. He was a commercial artist, specialising in drawing for calendars and cards. Scott's mother, Frances, née Mark (1886–1969) was the daughter of a labourer from south London. In later life Scott noted the tension in himself between the pull of his mother's creative ambition and his father's real world, grounded approach to life. Scott was educated at the private Winchmore Hill Collegiate School, but had to leave early, without any qualifications, as his father's business met financial difficulties. This division from his studies was mirrored through the rest of his life—the battle between the demands of practical needs versus the urge to create. Scott worked as an accounts clerk for C. T. Payne and took evening classes in book-keeping and wrote poetry in his spare time. He later noted that the rigid social hierarchies and codes of his suburban childhood he found echoed in British Indian society. Military service Scott was conscripted into the British Army as a private soldier early in 1940, with the British Intelligence Department. He trained as a private in Torquay with the 8th Battalion, "The Buffs." During this time two of his aunts were killed in an air raid. In 1943, at the age