Derek Robinson is a British novelist, born in Bristol in 1932, best known for a sequence of mordant, meticulously researched novels about the men who flew for Britain in two world wars.
A grammar-school boy who read history at Cambridge and served as an RAF fighter plotter during his National Service, he worked for years in advertising on both sides of the Atlantic - and refereed rugby for three decades - before and alongside his writing. His fiction is marked by black comedy and flawed, unheroic heroes; of one squadron commander he remarked that he was 'not the sort of man you'd want your daughter to marry'.
His debut, Goshawk Squadron, follows a Royal Flying Corps squadron on the Western Front in the last months of the First World War, its cynical major drilling doomed young pilots in the brutal realities of air combat; it was shortlisted for the 1971 Booker Prize. He returned to the theme again and again - the Battle of Britain in Piece of Cake, later filmed for television, the Desert Air Force in A Good Clean Fight, and Bomber Command in Damned Good Show - alongside the comic Luis Cabrillo spy novels.
A lifelong Bristolian, he has also written engagingly about the city's history.
