Henry Williamson, English farmer, soldier, and author (d. 1977)

Henry William Williamson (1 December 1895 – 13 August 1977) was an English author who wrote novels concerned with wildlife, English social history and ruralism. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 for his book Tarka the Otter.

He was born in London, and brought up in a semi-rural area where he developed his love of nature, and nature writing. He fought in World War I and, having witnessed the Christmas Truce and the devastation of trench warfare, he developed first a pacifist ideology, then Fascist sympathies. He moved to Devon after World War II and took up farming and writing; he wrote many other novels. He married twice. He died in a hospice in Ealing in 1977, and was buried in North Devon.