Author, teacher and journalist Jinadasa Vijayatunga grew up in the village of Urala before attending a boarding school in Galle in Southern Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). His Sinhalese-speaking parents employed a tutor to teach him English. He began his career as a teacher and journalist in Sri Lanka. He then taught in Tagore’s school in Bengal, and then as an examiner in Sinhalese for Calcutta University, 1927-8. He taught in New York from 1928 to 1931 before he went to London as a journalist. He lived most of his adult life abroad in America, England and India, before returning to Sri Lanka towards the end of his life.

Vijayatunga’s fiction published in London focuses on Sri Lanka. Grass for My Feet (1935) provides a series of vignettes of village life in Sri Lanka. It is based on Vijayatunga’s childhood memories growing up in a small remote village in Sri Lanka at the turn of the century. His book Island Story (1949) is a more factual account. It purports to convey an intimate knowledge of the island in terms of its people, history, culture and geographical layout. His choice of topics – Green Field and Valleys, The Gift of Water, Tea Gardens, Island Neighbours, Kings and Heroes of Old, Kandy the Lake City – suggests a desire to represent both Ceylon’s ancient traditions and present-day life. Published in the year after Ceylon gained independence, the book illuminates the newly independent country to the rest of the world. Both books were well-received in both Britain and Sri Lanka. They were hailed as great literary achievements and unique introductions of the island. Sri Lankan and Indian publishers have recently re-published these two works.

Herbert Read was born on 4 December 1893 at Muscoates Grange Farm in Yorkshire. In 1912, he studied law and economics at Leeds University. From 1915, he served in the army and was promoted to captain by the end of the First World War. After the war he became a convinced pacifist.

While on leave in London during the War, he came into contact with key figures of London’s literary and artistic circles such as T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. After 1918, he continued his career as a poet and literary critic. From 1923 he contributed regularly to T. S. Eliot’s journal Criterion. He published with Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and became literary adviser to Heinemann and Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1937.

In the 1930s, Read befriended Mulk Raj Anand and, according to Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981), the two of them met with Eric Gill and Stanley Morrison to talk about art. Anand describes Read thus: ‘strikingly tall, with tousled hair, sallow face, mongoloid high cheekbones, and soft shy eyes’ (p.112).

Read also befriended M. J. Tambimuttu, the founder-editor of Poetry London. Read contributed to the first edition of Poetry London (1939), Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime (1942) and to the Festschrift for Marianne Moore’s Seventy-Seventh Birthday (1964), edited by Tambimuttu.

By the 1950s and 60s, Read had established himself as a renowned critic on literature and the arts, his reputation resting on several major works. He died on 12 June 1968.

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, near Nottingham, to coalminer Arthur Lawrence and Lydia Beardsall. Lawrence won a County Council scholarship and went to Nottingham High School. He did not excel, but went on to teach at the British School in Eastwood. In 1906, he started to write what would eventually become his first novel, The White Peacock (published in 1911). While teaching at Davidson Road elementary school in Croydon in 1908, he continued to write. His friend Jessie Chambers showed his writing to Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), who recommended it to William Heinemann for publication.

By 1913, Lawrence had met and married Frieda Emma Maria Johanna, and the two of them lived briefly in Germany (near Munich) and Italy before the First World War. Forced to stay in England, Lawrence soon began to meet the people associated with Garsington Manor around Lady Ottoline Morrell. His new acquaintances included Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley. Their meeting on 29 November 1915 with Lady Ottoline Morrell along with Philip Heseltine, Aldous Huxley, Willy MacQueen and Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy is recorded in his letters:

There was an Indian there - a lineal descendent of the Prophet, whose curse is a dreadful thing - and a young musician, and Bertie Russell. Of course we talked violently in between-whiles, politics and India and so on. I always shout too loud. That annoys the Ottoline. The Indian says (he is of Persian family): "Oh, she is so like a Persian princess, it is strange - something grand, and perhaps cruel." It is pleasant to see with all kinds of eyes, like Argus. Suhrawardy was my pair of Indo-persian eyes. He is coming to Florida. (Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. II )

After the war, Lawrence moved to Italy, France and Sicily, before going to America in 1922. He briefly visited friends in Ceylon first, before leaving for Austrialia and arriving on the west coast of the United States. In 1926, he returned to Italy and revived his friendship with Aldous Huxley. There he started writing Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).

During the late 1920s, Lawrence visted London frequently. He met Mulk Raj Anand at a sherry party at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop. In Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981), Anand, who was still a student of philosophy then, describes the meeting thus: '"I am not sure which philosophy you are studying," said Lawrence and coughed a wheezy cough. "But I hope you can trust your eyes, nose, mouth, skin and the human sense against the ethereal Tagory"' (p. 23). Lawrence had previously been outspoken in his criticism of Tagore's indictment of nationalism, and his prejudices about the East made Anand uncomfortable. Already in 1916, Lawrence had scorned the writing of Tagore. In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell dated 24 May 1916, he wrote:

I become more and more surprised to see how far higher, in reality, our European civilizations stands than the East, India or Persia ever dreamed of. And one is glad to realize how these Hindus are horribly decadent and reverting to all forms of barbarism in all sorts of ugly ways. We feel surer on our feet, then. But this fraud of looking up to them - this wretched worship-of-Tagore attitude - is disgusting. "Better fifty years of Europe" even as she is. Buddha worship is completely decadent and foul nowadays: and it was always only half civilized. (The Collected Letters, p. 451)

Lawrence and Anand would remain friends, though. After returning to the continent, Lawrence's health deteriorated and he settled in Bandol, in the south of France, by the sea, where his friends rallied around him in his last months. Mulk Raj Anand visited Lawrence a few weeks before his death on 2 March 1930.

Leonard Sidney Woolf was born in Kensington, London, to Sidney Woolf QC and Marie de Jongh. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he befriended Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Thoby Stephen (son of Sir Leslie Stephen, brother of Virginia and Vanessa). Out of these friendships of the so-called 'Apostles' the 'Bloomsbury Group' emerged.

In 1904, Woolf joined the Colonial Civil Service in Ceylon but resigned in 1912 because of his growing disillusionment with imperialism, but also because he had fallen in love with Virginia Stephen. Leonard and Virginia married in 1912 and Virginia took Leonard's family name. After Virginia's death in 1941, Woolf continued to oversee and publish her uncollected essays and a selection of her diaries.

Woolf was a member of the Fabian Society and in 1916 wrote two Fabian reports that were to become part of the basis of the League of Nations. His anti-imperialism, socialism, and internationalism found expression in a number of books and pamphlets, and from 1919 to 1945 he served as secretary to the Labour Party's advisory committees on international and imperial questions. Woolf also became involved in editing the Nation, the Political Quarterly and the New Statesman. More significantly, he and Virginia established the Hogarth Press in 1917. In 1942, he provided the Introduction to Mulk Raj Anand's Letters to India. 

Leonard Woolf suffered a stroke and died on 14 August 1969 at Monk's House, a cottage in Rodmell he and Virginia had bought in 1919.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, USA, to Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns in 1888. He graduated from Smith Academy, St Louis, in 1905 before studying for a year at Milton Academy, outside Boston, and eventually following his brother to Harvard in 1906. He attained a BA in Comparative Literature in 1909 and an MA in English literature in 1910. From 1910-1911 he studied at the Sorbonne, Paris, before returning to his graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard the following year. As part of his studies there he took courses in Pali and Sanskrit, and on Hindu thought. He also met Bertrand Russell at Harvard.

In the summer of 1914, Eliot went to London on a travelling fellowship. There, he immediately struck up a friendship with Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound, and in 1915 he was introduced to Vivienne Haigh-Wood whom he married in June of that year. He spent the next years teaching in High Wycombe and Highgate, London, until his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. His long poem The Waste Land (1922) consolidated his Modernist breakthrough.

Bertrand Russell introduced Eliot to Lady Ottoline Morrell and the people surrounding Garsington Manor such as Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, James Joyce and, later, Mulk Raj Anand. In Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981), Anand relates how he first met Eliot at a sherry party at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop; also present was Nikhil Sen. By this time, Eliot was the editor of the literary journal Criterion and wanted Anand to to do some work for him. Anand describes more meetings with Eliot in the Criterion office where they would often talk about religion and writing. In 1925, Eliot was made literary editor of Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber). He drew coloser to Christianity, and in 1927 he was baptised into the Church of England. Later that year he became a British citizen.

In the 1930s, Eliot focused less on his own writing and became primarily a cultural critic. After the Second World War he gave up writing poetry altogether and turned his attention to plays and literary essays. In the 1940s, he asked the Ceylonese poet and editor Meary James Tambimuttu to edit the anthology Poetry in Wartime (1942) for Faber. Eliot was a support of Tambimuttu's successful magazine Poetry London. He said of it: 'It is only in Poetry London that I can consistently expect to find new poets who matter' (back cover of Poetry London).

In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was awarded the Order of Merit. In his later years, he assumed a more reclusive lifestyle, sharing a flat with his friend John Hayward in Carlyle Mansions on the Chelsea Embankment, until his marriage to his second wife Valerie Fletcher in 1957 . He died on 4 January 1965 of emphysema at his home in London.

Nikhil Sen was a friend of Mulk Raj Anand and moved in the same circles in London in the 1920s. Little is known about Sen; however, Anand mentions him extensively in Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981).

It appears that Sen was already in London when Anand arrived in 1925. Like Anand, Sen was a student at University College, London. He was also a poet and an art lover. According to Anand, Sen studied in the British Museum Reading Rooms and the two often lunched together in University College lower refectory, the Museum Tavern or at Poggiolis in Charlotte Street. Sen's girlfriend was Edna Thompson, who was a student of literature; other fellow students included Mr. Topa and Parkash Pandit. Sen apparently worked at Arthur Probsthain’s Oriental Bookshop in Russell Street, and found work for Anand in Jacob Schwartz’s Ulysses Bookshop.  

Furthermore, Sen already knew several members of the 'Bloomsbury Group' when Anand arrived in Britain. Indeed, it was Sen who introduced Anand to Bonamy Dobree, Gwenda Zeidmann, Jacob Schwartz, Harold Monro, Edith Sitwell, Laurence Binyon and Leonard Woolf. Together they met T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence, and they would go to the British Museum with Laurence Binyon. Like Anand, Sen was frustrated by the orientalist views of some members of the Bloomsbury Group and would often argue with Eliot and Lawrence.

David Garnett, the son of Edward Garnett and Constance Black, was well-connected in literary circles and with Socialist and revolutionary European exiles in his youth. Garnett was a writer and publisher, and involved with the Bloomsbury Group. He was editor of the New Statesman from 1932 to 1934.

Garnett met his first Indian while preparing for the London Matriculation at the London Tutorial College in Red Lion Square. He met a young Bengali, Dutt (Sukhsagar Datta), who introduced him to his friends, Ashutosh Mitter and Niranjan Pal (playwright and son of Bepin Chandra Pal). Garnett became close friends with these young Indians, meeting them at various times in London and taking them down to his family's home in Caerne. At some point after 1907, Dutt took Garnett to India House in Highgate, where he was introduced to V. D. Savarkar and spoke to Madan Lal Dhingra briefly.

After the murder of Curzon Wyllie in July 1909, Savarkar asked Garnett to publish Dhingra's statement, which Garnett passed on to Robert Lloyd at the Daily News where it appeared the next morning. Attracted by Savarkar's 'extraordinary personal magnetism', Garnett would meet him regularly, and when Savarkar was arrested and put into Brixton Gaol, Garnett visited him there. Garnett takes credit for hatching a plan to help Savarkar escape from prison, enlisting the help of Indian exiles in Paris. The plan was foiled when his family found out about it, despite Maud Gonne's attempts to warn Garnett. When Savarkar returned to India, Garnett severed all ties with him.

Aubrey Menen was a writer, essayist, broadcaster, journalist, drama critic and activist. His work explored the question of nationalism and the cultural contrast between his own Irish-Indian ancestry and his traditional British upbringing. He was born to an Irish mother and an Indian father in 1912 and was brought up in Islington, later moving to Forest Hill, south London. He studied philosophy at University College London (UCL), where he formed his own drama group, and befriended the artist Duncan Grant who introduced him to many members of the Bloomsbury Group, including John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He persuaded H. G. Wells to allow him to adapt The Shape of Things to Come, even though Wells had already sold the rights to Alexander Korda. Korda agreed to three closed performances, which caused a sensation. At UCL he was rejected for the Rosa Morrison Bursary by the then Jewish Master of the college on the grounds that he was not of 'pure' English descent.

After graduating in 1932, Menen became the drama critic for The Bookman from 1933 to 1934. He also became involved with Krishna Menon's India League and toured the regions as a speaker. So that he would not be confused with Menon, a friend of his father's, he anglicized his name to Menen. In 1934, Menen, together with the actor Andre van Gysegham, founded the Experimental Theatre, which sought to create a politically engaging theatre in alternative performance spaces. His radical plays regularly ran into difficulties with the Lord Chamberlain and he was sued for blasphemy and obscenity for his 1934 play Genesis II. From 1937 to 1939 he worked as director of the Personalities Press Service. In April 1939 he moved to Bombay, finding work at All-India Radio. During the Second World War, he worked as a script writer and editor for propaganda broadcasts for the Government of India. He also broadcast regularly on the radio and became a leading radio personality in India. He subsequently worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson's film department. In the late 1940s, after the war, he became a full-time writer. He briefly returned to Britain in the autumn 1947 to oversee the publication of The Prevalence of Witches. In 1948 he moved to Italy, to live in what he described as a space midway between India and England. He lived there until 1980. He spent his final years living in Kerala, where he died in 1989.

Menen's output was prolific and covered a variety of genres. Starting his career as a dramatist and critic, he moved to radio journalism. He authored nine novels, several travel books, autobiographical works, essays and reviews. He also published a version of The Ramayana, Rama Retold, which was banned in India but, despite its radical implications, performed in London amidst some controversy. His fiction is driven by a caustic satire and his essays reveal a passionate desire to break down the falsity of racial myths of 'Aryan' superiority, whether in India amongst Nairs or in Nazi Germany; a similar perspective is evident in relation to the hypocrisy of racial stereotyping in Britain. Menen expresses in his non-fiction the advantage of dual vision: born to Indian and Irish parents, brought up as a brown Englishman in Britain, and in India always a foreigner. This liminality takes on sexual dimensions throughout his autobiographical essays which reflect, despite his conversion to Catholicism, a radical homosexuality.