William Alexander Gerhardie

Born in St Petersburg in 1895 to British parents, he was educated in Russia and later in England. During the First World War he served with the British Embassy in Petrograd and with the British military mission in Siberia, experiences that fed directly into his early writing.

His debut novel, Futility (1922), drew on the collapse of old Russia, and he followed it with The Polyglots (1925), often regarded as his best-known work. In the 1920s he was widely admired for a style that mixed comedy, melancholy, and close observation, though his reputation faded for a time before later readers and publishers helped revive interest in his work.

He also wrote plays, criticism, memoir, and other fiction across a long career, and he died in 1977. Today he is remembered as an unusual English-language novelist of the interwar years whose work linked British literary wit with a deep knowledge of Russian life.