Barry England

Barry England (16 March 1932 – 21 May 2009) was an English novelist and playwright. He is chiefly known for his 1968 thriller Figures in a Landscape, which was nominated for the inaugural Booker Prize.

England was raised in a Roman Catholic household and studied at Downside School. He joined the British Army and served in the Far Eastern theatre, where he did his share of arduous marches "over two or three mountains in a day". His stint in the army would serve England well later in his literary career. He studied at RADA as a playwright, and around this time began writing pieces for magazines. The first of England's plays to be produced was End of Conflict, which was staged at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry in November 1961. The young Ian McKellen played one of the principal roles in this story of British soldiers serving in the Far East. The success of End of Conflict led to the Arts Council awarding a playwriting bursary to England.

In 1963, the Belgrade staged England's next play The Big Contract, a story of industrial dispute in a large firm. England also wrote plays for television throughout the 1960s, for example, The Move After Checkmate, a crime thriller that was broadcast in 1966 as part of Anglia Television's "Play of the Week" series.

Figures in a Landscape was England's first novel. Published by Jonathan Cape in the summer of 1968, it was hailed by critics as an exemplary addition to the literature of escape. Two professional soldiers, Ansell and MacConnachie, have escaped from a column of POWs in an unnamed country in the tropics. Safety across the border lies 400 miles away; in the meantime, they must make their way through alien territory, battling the climate and the terrain as well as the enemy's soldiers and helicopters. The Times called the book "a fiercely masochistic accomplishment" and concluded another review as follows:

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