Godfrey Blunden

Godfrey Verge ‘Geof’ Blunden (19 March 1906 – 15 March 1996) was an Australian journalist and author.

Godfrey Blunden was born in Melbourne. While he was a journalist in Sydney in the early 1930s he wrote his first novel No More Reality a "small country town" novel, published in 1935 by Jonathan Cape. Even though the edition was only 500 copies it was considered important, due to praise from Norman Lindsay, Brian Penton in the Bulletin, and others in the Telegraph and elsewhere in the Sydney press. Early Australian modernist poet Ronald McCuaig dedicated his 1938 book of poems Vaudeville to Blunden.

Employed by the Sydney Daily Telegraph Blunden was sent to England in 1941 and covered the Battle of Britain, before travelling in 1942 to the Soviet Union, where he covered fighting in the Stalingrad (Volgograd) and Kharkov (Kharkiv) fronts. His dispatches were also published in the London Evening Standard. He never returned to Australia, but was a passionate Australian and never gave up his close bond with the country through exchanging letters and receiving visits from his extended family and later devoting most of his writing to Australian subjects and themes.

Blunden authored several novels, including A Room on the Route (about the NKVD, predecessor to the KGB, during World War II) and The Time of the Assassins. His novel Charco Harbour is a modernist historical fiction on Captain James Cook and his journey along the Australian coast in 1768. He died in Paris in 1996.

Select works No More Reality, 1935 A Room on the Route, 1947 The Time of the Assassins, 1953 The Looking Glass Conference, 1957 Charco Harbour, 1968

Non-fiction select works The Land and People of Australia, 1954 Australia and Her People, 1960 Impressionists and impressionism (with Maria Blunden), 1972 Norman Lindsay Watercolours. Fifteen Reproductions in Colour from Original Watercolours with an Appreciation of the Medium By Norman Lindsay and a Survey of the Artist's Life and Work, 1973