English-born Australian novelist who showed a special talent for weaving his technical knowledge of engineering into the texture of his fictional narrative. His most famous work, On the Beach (1957), reflected his pessimism for humanity in the atomic age.

Shute was educated at Shrewsbury, served in the British army late in World War I, and then completed his education at the University of Oxford. He became an aeronautical engineer, a job he combined with his career as a novelist. Following World War II he settled in Australia.

Marazan (1926) was the first of 25 books Shute wrote in a career that spanned 30 years. His major works include So Disdained (1928) and What Happened to the Corbetts (1939), a foretaste of World War II's bombing of civilians. His later novels—all set in Australia—reflected a growing feeling of despair about the future of humanity. A Town Like Alice (1950) dealt with the Far Eastern theatre of World War II. In On The Beach Shute describes the effect of an atomic war and vividly pictures the complete destruction of the human race.