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Portrait of Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler

(1905-1983)
Author

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Koestler was educated at the University of Vienna, and spent the next five years as a foreign correspondent, travelling and reporting the current situations in the Middle East, Paris and Berlin before joining the Graf Zeppelin Arctic Expedition in 1931. He then travelled in Russia and what was then Soviet Central Asia before being sent to Spain as the correspondent of the News Chronicle to cover the Civil War in 1936-37; as a result of this he was imprisoned by General Franco. After his release he saw war service in the French Foreign Legion and the British Pioneer Corps, and after the war became a full-time writer, fame having come with the publication of "Darkness at Noon" in 1940. He won the Sonning Prize and was awarded an Hon DLitt by Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario in 1968, was made a CBE in 1972 and a CLit in 1974, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He set up a trust fund to establish, after his death, a Chair of Parapsychology at a British University. Edinburgh won this honour, and with it Koestler's own archive of most of his surviving MSS and correspondence, and annotated books from his library. "The Koestler Archive in Edinburgh University Library: a checklist", by Susan Smyth, was published by the Library in 1987. The original bequest of MSS and of books has been augmented by gifts from the London Library, bequests from Koestler's literary executor Harold Harris, and purchases from the sculptor Daphne Hardy Henrion, and others. Koestler's interest in extra-sensory perception has been further enhanced by the gift to the Library in 1993 by the University of Oxford Museum of 300 volumes on spiritualism and the paranormal from the library of Alfred Russell Wallace.
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