 There had of course been a few important works in English prior to 1950 from the then British Empire.The South African writer Olive Schreiner's famous novel "The Story of an African Farm" was published in 1883 and New Zealander Katherine Mansfield published her first collection of short stories, "In a German Pension", in 1911.The first major English-language novelist from the Indian sub-continent, R. K. Narayan, began publishing in England in the 1930s, encouraged by English novelist Graham Greene.