E. L. Grant Watson

Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson (14 June 1885 – 21 May 1970) was a writer and biologist. Among some 40 books and many essays and short stories he wrote six 'Australian' novels and several scientific-philosophical works that challenge Darwinism, or the mechanism of evolutionary theory, as an entire explanation for the development of life on earth.

Born at Staines, Middlesex in England, the son of a successful London barrister, Reginald Grant Watson, and Lucy, née Fuller, a strong-minded woman with an interest in natural history and literature, 'Peter' (as he was called) visited Australia first as a child in 1890, soon after the death of his younger brother. During this visit, to relatives in Tasmania, his father also died. In rather more impoverished circumstances, Grant Watson was educated at Bedales School and Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1909, with first-class honours in natural sciences) after which, at 24, he joined social anthropologist Alfred Brown (later Alfred Radcliffe-Brown) and Daisy Bates on an ethnological expedition in Western Australia. His experiences in the desert country at Southern Cross (near Kalgoorlie) and at Sandstone in the Murchison region, and later at the Aboriginal lock hospitals of Shark Bay, determined him to become a writer.

After further travels in Fiji, Canada and Ceylon he enlisted in the British Army but after a mental breakdown was seconded to perform biological research with parasitologist Clifford Dobell the Burroughs-Wellcome laboratory for tropical diseases in London. Later he taught officer cadets at a private college in Storrington.

On 17 July 1919 at Hampstead registry office he married Katharine Hannay.

During his writing career, by nature restless, he moved between a succession of homes in the English countryside and the expatriate colonies of pre-war Florence and Paris; through Bohemian London and prohibition New York, to Palestine and the Arctic Circle, while navigating friendships with writers Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, Havelock Ellis, D.H. Lawrence; poets Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and Ferenc Békássy, the psychologist Helton Godwin Baynes, Geoffrey Keynes, Mabel Dodge Luhan, naturalist Frank Fraser Darling, and—in later life—Owen Barfield and Carl Jung.

...
Wikipedia