Author: David Lindsay

David Lindsay (1876-1945) is a writer best known for his first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus. Published in 1920, it has been called “the greatest imaginative work of the twentieth century” (Colin Wilson), “a stupendous ontological fable” (E H Visiak), “a masterpiece… an extraordinary work” (Clive Barker), “that shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work” (C S Lewis), and “less a novel than it is private kabbalah” (Alan Moore). John Grant, in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, called it “a masterpiece of allegorical fantasy”. Lindsay himself said that as long as publishing existed he would have readers, however few, and has been proved right. A Voyage to Arcturus, and his subsequent novels The Haunted Woman (1922), Sphinx (1923), The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly (1926) and Devil”s Tor (1932) have found a growing audience of devotees, enabling his unpublished novels (The Violet Apple, and the unfinished The Witch) to be brought out in the 1970s. He has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Romanian and Turkish.