Brian Brendon Talbot Cleeve (22 November 1921 – 11 March 2003) was a writer, whose published works include twenty-one novels and over a hundred short stories.

He lived in South Africa during the early years of National Party rule and was expelled from the country because of his opposition to apartheid.

Charles Cleeve, who was born in Limerick, Ireland, was a scion of a famous and wealthy family that ran several successful Irish enterprises in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As a result of labour troubles and the effects of the Irish Civil War, the Cleeve business failed and Charles moved with his family to England, where Brian was born in 1921.

When he was two-and-a-half, Brian's mother died and his maternal grandparents, Alfred and Gertrude Talbot, took over responsibility for his upbringing.

His unwillingness to conform meant that school life was very difficult for him, and, in the late summer of 1938, Cleeve decided not to return to St. Edward's for his final year.

In 1940, he was selected for officer training, was commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry,[4] and sent to Kenya as a Second lieutenant in the King's African Rifles.

A year later, they left Ireland with baby daughter Berenice on a protracted odyssey that took them to London, Sweden, the West Indies, and finally South Africa.

Trevor Huddleston, Cleeve witnessed the conditions in which the black and coloured population had to live in townships such as Sophiatown.

Cleeve became an outspoken critic of Apartheid, and, in 1954, he was branded by the authorities as a 'political intractable' and ordered to leave South Africa.

Two further novels about South Africa followed and their unvarnished descriptions of the reality of life for the native population probably contributed to Cleeve's eventual expulsion from the country.

Cleeve subsequently achieved even greater commercial success, especially in the United States, with a number of historical novels featuring a strong female character as protagonist.

This was a 20-year project to provide to scholars and the general public alike a comprehensive resource on Irish writers at an affordable price.

[8] In January 1966, Telefís Éireann announced that Cleeve was being dropped as presenter of Discovery because his voice was deemed to be "too light in tone".

There, Cleeve and his colleagues set about exposing issues of public interest, much to the dismay of the traditional power structures of big business, the Catholic Church and the political parties.

[10] Telefís Éireann did not renew his contract when it expired in 1973, ironically, just as his last documentary won two awards at the Golden Prague International Television Festival.

The documentary, Behind The Closed Eye, focused on the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge who was killed while serving in the British army in Belgium during World War I.

[12] The first of these, The House on the Rock, contains a series of meditations on a wide variety of topics from the nature of good and evil to more secular matters such as politics and nuclear energy.