Alexander Cordell (1914 - 1997) was a prolific novelist and author of thirty works which include the Mortymer trilogy: Rape of the Fair Country, Hosts of Rebecca and Song of the Earth. He was born George Alexander Graber in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the son of a soldier. Much of his youth was spent in the Far East, particularly China, to which he would return to in later fiction. He joined the British Army in 1932 aged eighteen, reaching the rank of major in the Royal Engineers before demobilisation in 1946 saw him pursue a second career as a quantity surveyor. He settled with his wife and young daughter in the Welsh border town of Abergavenny. His first novel was published in 1954 but attracted little attention. It was the publication of Rape of the Fair Country in 1959 which went on to become an international best-seller which enabled him to sustain a career as a writer of fiction. He would return several times, over a long career, to the stories of his adopted country's industrial past and has become one of the best-loved and most read of modern Welsh novelists.