Simon Arthur Noël Raven was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence. His obituary in The Guardian noted that, "he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester", and that he reminded Noel Annan, his Cambridge tutor, of the young Guy Burgess. Among the many things said about him, perhaps the most quoted was that he had "the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel". E W Swanton called Raven's cricket memoir Shadows in the Grass "the filthiest cricket book ever... written". He has also been called "cynical" and "cold-blooded", his characters "guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all". His unashamed credo was "a robust eighteenth-century paganism.allied to a deep contempt for the egalitarian code of post-war England" He was born on 28 December 1927 He was the eldest of three children. His father, Arthur Raven, had inherited a fortune from the family's hosiery business, and lived an idle life of leisure.
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| Birthdate: | December 28, 1927 |
| Date of death: | May 12, 2001 |
| Education: | King's College, Cambridge, Charterhouse School |
| Also known as: | Simon Arthur Noel Raven |