Peter Mayne was born in England in 1908. At the age of twenty he went out to India, where his father was a serior member of the Department of Education. For a while he worked as a mercantile assistant in a firm of merchant-shippers, but he was never a successful businessman. At the time of Partition, the Pakistan Government invited him to serve as Deputy Secretary to the Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation. When the tension died down, he resigned from government service and settled in Morocco to write his first book. He died in 1979.