E. M. Forster (1879 to 1970) was an English author and one of the defining novelists of the Edwardian era. Educated at Tonbridge School and King’s College, Cambridge – where his circle included the future writers Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf – he travelled through Europe before publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in 1905. The books that secured his reputation followed: A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India.
Forster’s novels return again and again to class difference and hypocrisy, examined with a humanist’s eye, and his range ran well beyond fiction: essays, broadcasts, biographies and the co-written libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. His short story “The Machine Stops” is often credited as the starting point of technological dystopian fiction. The honours tell their own story: nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 22 separate years, he declined a knighthood in 1949 but accepted the Order of Merit at 90. His final novel, Maurice, a story of love between men completed in 1914, was published only in 1971, the year after his death.
5 hours and 14 minutes
