Dan Davin

Daniel Marcus "Dan" Davin CBE (1 September 1913 – 28 September 1990) was an author who wrote about New Zealand, although for most of his career he lived in Oxford, England, working for Oxford University Press. The themes of his earliest fiction, in short stories that include Saturday Night, Late Snow, The Apostate, The Basket, The Vigil, and The Milk Round, were about "Mick Connolly" and his family in Southland.

Davin was born in Invercargill, New Zealand, into an Irish Catholic family, and was educated at local Catholic primary and secondary schools. He won a scholarship for a final school year at Sacred Heart College in Auckland, then a university scholarship to the University of Otago.

In 1934 he received First Class Honours in English, and in 1935 a Dip. MA Single Honours in Latin. Winning a Rhodes Scholarship in 1935, he studied at Balliol College Oxford (BA, 1st class 1939, MA 1945). In 1939 he married Winifred Gonley, also from Southland; the couple had three daughters. One of their daughters, Delia, went on to become a writer on Chinese social issues.

He served as an intelligence officer in the New Zealand Division in the Middle East in World War II, being evacuated from Greece and wounded on Crete. He was mentioned in despatches three times and awarded an MBE (Mil.). Writing the official war history Crete took most of his spare time from 1946-53.

Post-war he took part in a BBC Radio discussion on the Battle of Monte Cassino with the former German commander Frido von Senger, who had also been a Rhodes Scholar and Paddy Costello, who like Davin had been in Freyberg’s intelligence team. Subsequently he wrote of "New Zealanders at war, post-war tensions, exile and return".

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