Robert Nye has explored the different modes available to a contemporary writer--poetry, drama, and fiction--yet his work is recognizably of a piece in its approach and concerns. His writing is both traditional and highly individual: traditional in that he works with archetypal themes and myths available to all writers of story and legend both oral and literary, and individual in the forms in which he recreates them.

Nye was born 15 March 1939, in London, into a family of modest background: his father, Oswald Nye, was a clerk, and his mother, Frances Weller Nye, having left school at twelve, never learned to read and write properly. Yet in Nye's account of his childhood and schooling it is possible to see at that point the outlines of the kind of writer he would become. His mother, he says, "was possessed of an innate peasant storytelling ability," and this emphasis on narrative...