Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children (Letters from a Lost Uncle, 1948), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye (1953), a relatively tightly structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.

[2] Mervyn Peake was born of British parents in Kuling located on top of Mount Lu in Jiujiang in 1911, only three months before the revolution and the founding of the Republic of China.

Ernest and Amanda met in July 1903 at Kuling (from the English word "cooling"), a summer European missionary resort in Mount Lu about the Yangtze River in Jiujiang.

Peake never returned to China but it has been noted that Chinese influences can be detected in his works, not least in the castle of Gormenghast itself, which in some respects echoes his birthplace Kuling, the ancient walled city of Beijing, as well as the enclosed compound where he grew up in Tianjin.

[citation needed] It is also likely that his early exposure to the contrasts between the lives of the Europeans and of the Chinese, and between the poor and the wealthy in China, also exerted an influence on the Gormenghast books.

Peake had a very successful exhibition of paintings at the Calmann Gallery in London in 1938 and his first book, the self-illustrated children's pirate romance Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (based on a story he had written around 1936), was first published in 1939 by Country Life.

In December 1939, he was commissioned by Chatto & Windus to illustrate a children's book, Ride a Cock Horse and Other Nursery Rhymes, published for the Christmas market in 1940.

In 1943 he was commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC, to paint glassblowers at the Chance Brothers factory in Smethwick where cathode ray tubes for early radar sets were being produced.

[6] Peake was next given a full-time, three-month WAAC contract to depict various factory subjects and was also asked to submit a large painting showing RAF pilots being debriefed.

He finished Titus Groan and Gormenghast and completed some of his most acclaimed illustrations for books by other authors, including Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (for which he was reportedly paid only £5) and Alice in Wonderland, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Brothers Grimm's Household Tales, All This and Bevin Too by Quentin Crisp and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as producing many original poems, drawings, and paintings.

Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Edgar Ainsworth, the art editor of Picture Post, commissioned Peake to visit France and Germany for the magazine.

[11] With writer Tom Pocock, Peake was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen, where the remaining prisoners, too sick to be moved, were dying before his very eyes.

He made several drawings, but not surprisingly he found the experience profoundly harrowing, and expressed in deeply felt poems the ambiguity of turning their suffering into art.

Peake taught part-time at the Central School of Art, began his comic novel Mr Pye, and renewed his interest in theatre.

On 18 December the BBC broadcast his radio play The Eye of the Beholder (later revised as The Voice of One), in which an avant-garde artist is commissioned to paint a church mural.

In 1984, BBC Radio 4 broadcast two 90-minute plays based on Titus Groan and Gormenghast, adapted by Brian Sibley and starring Sting as Steerpike and Freddie Jones as the Artist (narrator).

It starred Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Steerpike, Neve McIntosh as Fuchsia, June Brown as Nannie Slagg, Ian Richardson as Lord Groan, Christopher Lee as Flay, Richard Griffiths as Swelter, Warren Mitchell as Barquentine, Celia Imrie as Countess Gertrude, Lynsey Baxter and Zoë Wanamaker as the twins Cora and Clarice, and John Sessions as Dr Prunesquallor.

The supporting cast included Olga Sosnovska, Stephen Fry and Eric Sykes, and the series is also notable as the last screen performance by comedy legend Spike Milligan (as the Headmaster).

It was set in a "virtual" computer-generated world created by young computer game designers, and starred Jack Ryder (from EastEnders) as Titus, with Terry Jones (Monty Python's Flying Circus) narrating.

Irmin Schmidt, founder of seminal German Krautrock group Can, wrote an opera called Gormenghast, based on the novels; it was first performed in Wuppertal, Germany, in November 1998.

It also starred Paul Rhys, Miranda Richardson, James Fleet, Tamsin Greig, Fenella Woolgar, Adrian Scarborough and Mark Benton among others.

[25] Authors who have cited Peake as influences on their work include: Neil Gaiman,[26] Joanne Harris,[27] Simon Maginn,[28] Christopher Fowler[29] and Susannah Clarke.