John Antony Spurling[1] (born 17 July 1936) is a Kenyan-English playwright and author who has written thirty-five plays and seven books.
[7] After finishing his secondary education at Marlborough College, Spurling was called up for National Service and commissioned as a second lieutenant[4] in the Royal Artillery from 1955 to 1957.
[8] Spurling began his career as a playwright at the age of twelve when he first encountered Shakespeare’s plays at the Dragon School and wrote a farcical piece, performed by his fellow-pupils, about Julius Caesar's invasions of Britain.
Following a Sunday night performance of his play Gerald by professional actors directed by Michael Denison at the Duke of York’s Theatre, Spurling was given a two-year grant by a group of West End Managers and wrote MacRune’s Guevara, about the recently dead Che Guevara, which was performed in 1969 by the National Theatre and subsequently in many countries around the world.
[10] In 2015, Spurling was awarded the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for his fourth novel, set in fourteenth-century China, The Ten Thousand Things.