Edward Falaise Upward, FRSL (9 September 1903 – 13 February 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer who, prior to his death, was believed to be the UK's oldest living author.

Initially gaining recognition amongst the Auden Group as a highly imaginative surrealist writer, in the 1930s he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, after which his writing shifted towards Marxist realism.

After the arrival of Isherwood in Cambridge in 1923 the two created the surreal town of Mortmere, an obscene parody and repudiation of the various upper-class characters they encountered at the university.

From January 1926 Upward took up various teaching jobs in a number of locations, such as Carbis Bay, Worcester, Lockerbie, Loretto, Scarborough and Stowe.

[2] Upward remained committed to internationalism and socialism for the rest of his life, although he and Hilda left the CPGB in 1948, believing that it was no longer revolutionary and that its leadership was trying to appease the Labour government.

It describes in poetic prose the rebellion of a private tutor against his employer and the menacing world of the 1930s, inducing a nightmarish state, and concluding with the recognition that he must join the workers' movement.

The final volume, No Home but the Struggle (1977), sees Sebrill find new meaning by joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which helps him to write again.

In the last decades of the twentieth century Upward returned to writing short stories, which were published, along with reprints of earlier works, by the Enitharmon Press.

In an interview with Nicholas Wroe, which appeared in The Guardian the month before his hundredth birthday, Upward explained that the title "came from an idea for a story about Auden.

[4] On 13 February 2009 Upward died of a chest infection at a care home in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, where he had relocated in 2004 to be close to his daughter.