Nicholas Blake (1) (1904–1972)

Nicholas Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis, or C. Day Lewis, born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland, to Anglo-Irish parents. His father Frank Day-Lewis was a clergyman of the Church of Ireland. After 1906, following the death of his mother Kathleen when he was two years old, he was brought up in England by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives back in County Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset and then read classics (nicknamed "Greats") at Wadham College, Oxford, where he became a member of the circle of writers around W.H. Auden. While still a student, he published his first collection of poems. After graduating in 1927, he worked as a schoolteacher and to supplement his income, he wrote his first detective novel A Question of Proof, published in 1935 under the name Nicholas Blake. As Blake, he wrote 19 more crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways. Nicholas Blake became one of the UK's most popular detective novelists, and these books have remained in print. During World War II, he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in his novel Minute for Murder (1947). After the war, he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director before becoming a professor of Poetry at Cambridge and Oxford. He was appointed poet laureate of England in 1968.