Godfrey Blunden

Who was Godfrey Blunden?

Godfrey Blunden was an Australian journalist and author.

Godfrey Blunden was born in Melbourne. Employed by the Sydney Daily Telegraph he was sent to England in 1941 and covered the Battle of Britain before being sent to Russia in 1942 where he covered the Stalingrad and Kharkov forces. In 1944-1945 he covered the battles in Holland and Germany whilst attached to the US Ninth Airforce and the US Ninth Army. His World War 2 dispatches were published in the London Evening Standard.

He met Maria Rothenberg-Craipeau in Paris a month after the liberation of the city and after the war they both left for the United States, where they got married and lived eleven years.He worked for Time for 14 years as a reporter in New York and later as a correspondent in Paris and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction in 1953. He left Time-Life in 1965 to concentrate on novels and non-fiction. The Blundens settled in Paris and later in Vence, France. He never returned to Australia and was a permanent expatriate and an exile, but he 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.