(b Kuling [Guling], 9 July 1911; d Burcot, Oxfordshire, 16/17 Nov. 1968). British writer and illustrator, born in China, the son of medical missionaries. He is now best known as a novelist, but he studied at the Royal Academy Schools and spent much of his career teaching drawing in London art schools. His reputation rests mainly on his trilogy of novels Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959), a work of grotesque Gothic fantasy to which his vividly imaginative drawing style was well matched (originally, however, the books were published without his accompanying illustrations). Peake illustrated numerous other books, including Stevenson's Treasure Island (1949) and several by himself (among them an instructional manual, The Craft of the Lead Pencil, 1946).