Robert Keable

Born in 1887, he studied at Cambridge and was ordained in the Church of England before serving in Zanzibar. During the First World War he worked as a chaplain in East Africa, and those experiences later fed into his fiction and memoir-like writing.

He is best remembered for novels such as Simon Called Peter and The Mother of All Living, books that mixed religious questions, romance, and social criticism in ways that shocked some readers and fascinated others. His writing often drew directly on places he had known, especially Africa and the South Pacific.

Later in life he left the priesthood and settled in Tahiti. He died there in 1927, leaving behind a small but distinctive body of work shaped by travel, belief, and rebellion against convention.