Alan Scholefield

Born in Cape Town, Scholefield was educated at Queen's College, Queenstown and the University of Cape Town where he studied English literature and where he won an athletics blue and broke a South African junior record. After university, from which he graduated in 1951, Scholefield became a journalist on The Cape Times and The Cape Argus.

Scholefield was one of a group of journalists and writers who left South Africa in the 1960s to escape the rigid apartheid of the Prime Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd.

With his first wife Patricia, he lived in Spain writing short stories for America, Canada and London. The marriage broke up in 1960 and in 1962, he married the Australian journalist and novelist Anthea Goddard and settled in London. He worked in the London bureau of the Sydney Morning Herald twice, in 1954 and 1960, then as defence correspondent of The Scotsman. Goddard encouraged Scholefield to leave journalism to write novels.

Scholefield's first novel, A View of Vultures, was published in 1966. In addition to his novels, Scholefield wrote a non-fiction history of three African monarchies, The Dark Kingdoms. In the late 1960s, his book Great Elephant was optioned by the American producer Jud Kinberg and sold on to CBS New York, for which Scholefield did the first- and second-draft screenplays. He wrote three dramas for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and a stage adaptation of Treasure Island.

In 1981, Scholefield's novel Venom was made into a film starring Klaus Kinski, Nicol Williamson and Oliver Reed.