The Once and Future King

T.H. White died in 1964, leaving a literary legacy that places him alongside J R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Mervyn Peake as one of the 20th Century’s greatest British fantasists. He has inspired generations of fantasy writers, from Neil Gaiman to JK Rowling.

Born in India in 1906, White studied at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. He found success with his ‘preface to Malory’, The Sword in the Stone, a wonderfully imaginative retelling of King Arthur’s early life. He continued to explore the Arthurian mythos in four further volumes – The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, The Candle in the Wind and The Book of Merlyn – a sequence collectively known as The Once and Future King. The novels were famously adapted into the Disney film The Sword in the Stone in 1963.