[1] He won the 1943 Hawthornden Prize for Letters to Malaya and the Heinemann Award in 1947,[2] for the last volume of that title, or the entire collection.
[1] His mother was Emelie Madeline Belling while his father, Sir Sydney Skinner, was chairman of multiple businesses.
[3] Shortly after graduation Skinner, with fellow Oxford alumni Bede Griffiths and Hugh Waterman, settled in a cottage in the Cotswolds and began what they called an "experiment in common living".
In 1938 Martyn Skinner married Pauline Giles, with whom he had three sons and one daughter before the marriage was dissolved in 1987.
[1] Skinner's correspondence with the novelist R. C. Hutchinson has been published as Two Men of Letters (1979), OCLC 6815559.