Blue Plaque for Swindon writer Ralph Bates

Swindon Heritage is raising funds to install a blue plaque in Swindon to celebrate our internationally renowned writer, Ralph Bates.

 

In the late 1930s Time Magazine said that the Swindon-born novelist was "a better writer than Ernest Hemingway". Author, mountaineer, political agitator, soldier, academic... Ralph Bates was all these things, and yet today he is hardly remembered in his home town. He spent the first 30 years of his life in Swindon, where he was employed by the Great Western Railway, before moving to Spain. During the Spanish Civil War he fought in the anti-fascist International Brigades. Later, he settled in America, where he became Professor of English Literature at New York University. Many of Bates’s novels and short stories, such as Sierra, Lean Men and The Olive Field, are set in Spain. Another book, The Fields of Paradise, contains stories written during a brief stay in Mexico. His final book, The Dolphin in the Wood, is a semi-autobiographical account of his early life in North Wiltshire, often considered his best work. He died in New York in 2000, aged 101.

For more details about Ralph Bates, please visit http://www.theralphbatesproject.co.uk