Fred Urquhart (writer)

He had a particular love of horses and edited illustrated anthology The Book of Horses in 1981. He also edited a number of books and wrote reviews for magazines and newspapers.

In the 1960s, he published several volumes of short stories with historical and supernatural themes. One obituarist said, "His skill was to show characters in everyday, conversational action".

Urquhart was homosexual. He moved to Ashdown Forest in East Sussex in 1958 with his companion, the dancer Peter Wyndham Allen, but when Wyndham Allen died in 1990 Urquhart moved back to Scotland. He was a friend of Rhys Davies, with whom he shared a cottage in Tring in 1946, and of Norah Hoult.

Many of his stories revolved around rural life, set in the fictional town of Auchencairn in the Mearns countryside south of Aberdeen. The theme of many of these stories was a desire to escape the drudgery of every-day working-class life. One of these stories, "The Ploughing Match," won the Tom–Gallon Trust Award for 1951.

Starting in 1947, Urquhart worked as a reader for a literary agency in London until 1951., From 1951 to 1954 he read scripts for Metro–Goldwyn–Mayer. From 1951 to 1974 he was a reader for Cassell and Company in London. He was a London scout for Walt Disney Productions from 1959 to 1960. From 1967 to 1971, he was a reader for J. M. Dent and Sons in London.

In 1936, Urquhart published his first short story, followed by his first novel Time Will Knit in 1938. He went on to publish four novels and more eight volumes of short stories. The novel Jezebel's Dust (1951) is considered one of his best works. Many of his stories were read on the radio. Palace of Green Days was a Book at Bedtime in 1985.

On leaving school at the age of fifteen, he worked in a bookshop from 1927 to 1934. Because he was a pacifist and conscientious objector, during World War II, he worked on the land at Laurencekirk in the Mearns and later at Woburn Abbey. On visits to London, where he later lived, he met George Orwell and the Scottish painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.

Fred Urquhart or Frederick Burrows Urquhart (12 July 1912 – 2 December 1995) was a Scottish short story writer, novelist, editor and reviewer. He is considered Scotland's leading short story writer of the 20th-century. Writing in the Manchester Evening News in November 1944, George Orwell praised Urquhart's "remarkable gift for constructing neat stories with convincing dialogue."