Paul Ferris is a British biographer and novelist. Born in Swansea, Wales, in 1929, he was educated at the Bishop Gore School. His contemporaries included David Rees, author of the standard work on the Korean War of 1950?1953, and Sir Sam Edwards, physicist. After serving as a conscripted pay clerk in the Royal Air Force, Ferris worked on Swansea's evening newspaper before moving to London in 1953, where the magazine Womans Own employed him to edit readers' letters and invent some of his own. He was briefly on the staff of The Observer; and thereafter contributed feature articles to it as a freelance and became its radio critic. Radio was a medium he knew about from the inside, since for a few years the money he earned from writing radio 'talks' and 'features' ? the backbone of broadcast speech in the 1950s ? helped pay the bills, and enabled him to write his first book, the novel, A Changed Man. This was variously reviewed as a 'brilliant, often riotiously funny tour de force' and as 'yet another version of the [Kingsley] Amis-hero banging about full of lust and discontent. In 1960 his second novel, Then We Fall, was widely praised: 'comic, tragic and cunningly irrelevant.' 

January 1st, 1929 in Swansea (Age 95)