Norah Burke

Norah (Aileen) Burke (2 August 1907 Bedford, England – 1976 Suffolk, England) was a well known novelist and non-fiction writer famous for her descriptions of life in India during the early 20th century.

Her father, Redmond St. George Burke, was a Forest Officer in India and her early childhood was spent traveling through the Indian forests, often on elephant back. The Indian jungle and her interactions with its wild animals inspired her autobiographical travel books Jungle Child (1956), Eleven Leopards (1965), and Midnight Forests (1966). She also wrote a short story "Journey By Night".

Constantly changing camps, carrying their belongings by elephant, made education difficult, but she learned to write at the age of eight, and started writing stories straight away. She also read as much as she could, including bound volumes of Chums and Boy’s Own Paper, and even wrote and edited her own little magazine entitled The Monthly Dorrit.

She returned to England in 1919 to attend a school in Devonshire, and lived at her family home at The Auberies, Bulmer, near Sudbury, in Suffolk. Her first novel, Dark Road, was published in 1933, Burke drawing on her own background for the book's settings of Suffolk and India. After a second novel dealing with a European dictator (The Scarlet Vampire), she wrote Merry England, which was set in historical Suffolk.

Her next few novels, romances, appeared from Gerald Swan during the war and post-war years and, according to an article published in The Writer in January 1950, she had by then published 11 novels and her short stories and articles had appeared in more than 100 periodicals. Her work was published in France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Irish Free State,Holland, Australia, America and Canada. In 1954, she was the winner of the New York Herald Tribune World Short Story Contest.

As well as fiction, Norah Burke was also an enthusiastic travel writer, relating many of her early adventures in autobiographical travel books Jungle Child (1956), Tiger Country (1965) and Eleven Leopards (1965). She also wrote about wildlife in King Todd (1963), Fire in the Forest and The Midnight Forest (1966) and numerous short stories. She collaborated with her father on his book of big game hunting and camp life in the Indian jungles, Jungle Days (1935).

She married Henry Humphrey R. Methwold Walrond (1904-1987), a lawyer, and had two sons. She lived for many years at Thorne Court., in Cockfield, near Bury St. Edmunds, Suffollk. She died in 1976.

References

• Burke, Norah. 1956. Jungle Child W.W. Norton and Child, New York
• "The Raj: India, 1890-1920". Retrieved 6 July 2012. 
• 1965 ."Eleven Leopards"