Francis Yeats-Brown

Born in Genoa in 1886, Francis Yeats-Brown was a British officer who served in the Indian Army and later became a writer. He is most closely associated with The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, the memoir that made his name and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

His life was unusually varied even by the standards of adventure writers. Alongside his military career, he had wartime flying experience and wrote from direct knowledge of empire, training, and frontier life, which gave his books their energetic, eyewitness feel.

Yeats-Brown also wrote and spoke about yoga and Eastern thought, helping introduce those subjects to Western readers. Some of his later public views on politics were strongly controversial, but his reputation as an author still rests mainly on the force and color of his autobiographical writing.