Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE FRSL (also known as VSP; 16 December 1900 – 20 March 1997) was a British writer and literary critic.

The business ran into difficulty and his parents were lodging over a toy shop at 41 St Nicholas Street in Ipswich, where Pritchett was born on 16 December 1900.

Within a year Walter was declared bankrupt, the family moved to Woodford, Essex, then to Derby and he began selling women's clothing and accessories as a travelling salesman.

Walter's business failures, his casual attitude to credit and his easy deceitfulness[a] obliged the family to move frequently.

After the Great War[5][failed verification] Walter turned his hand to aircraft design, about which he knew nothing, and his later ventures included art needlework, property speculation and faith healing.

[7] During the Second World War Pritchett worked for the BBC and the Ministry of Information while continuing to write weekly essays for the New Statesman.

Fluent in French, German and Spanish, he published acclaimed biographies of Honoré de Balzac (1973), Ivan Turgenev (1977), and Anton Chekhov (1988).

[4] The V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize was founded by the Royal Society of Literature at the beginning of the new millennium to commemorate the centenary of the birth of "an author widely regarded as the finest English short-story writer of the 20th century, and to preserve a tradition encompassing Pritchett's mastery of narrative".