Frederick Burrows Urquhart was born in Edinburgh, the son of a chauffeur; and though he was both a novelist and short story writer, it was for his short stories that he was best known.

He was educated Stranraer High School and Edinburgh’s Broughton Secondary School before, at the age of 15, he started work at J.B. Cairns’ bookshop in Edinburgh. He hated being a bookseller and dreamed of becoming a writer. In 1935, when he was 23 he quit the bookshop to concentrate on his writing, and by 1938 his first novel, Time Will Knit, was published by Duckworth. Because he was a declared pacifist, at the outbreak of World War II he was sent to work on the land, and around this time, his first collection of short stories, I Fell for a Sailor (1940), was published.

Later came Fred’s second collection, The Clouds Are Big with Mercy (1946)’, and his two later novels, The Ferret was Abraham’s Daughter (1949) and Jezebel’s Dust (1951). Further volumes of stories included The Year of the Short Corn (1949), The Last Sister (1950), The Laundry Girl and the People (1955), The Dying Stallion (1967), and The Ploughing Match (1968). In 1978 he co-edited Modern Scottish Short Stories’, and his final works were the novel Palace of Green Days (1979), which drew upon his childhood in Perthshire where his father (Jim Lovat in the book) worked as a chauffeur, and two collections of short stories, A Diver in China Seas and Proud Lady in a Cage (both 1980).

In 1944 he started on a three-year stint working at the estate of the Duke of Bedford, which offered the opportunity to meet two literary notables, George Orwell and Rhys Davies. Soon after the end of World War II Urquhart began work as a reader for a London literary agency, and in the early 1950s he worked as a script-reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and as a reader and editor for Cassell. He was also a reviewer for the magazine Time and Tide and other journals between 1947 and 1974, and spent a year in the late 1950s as a literary scout for Walt Disney Productions.

In 1958 Fred moved to East Sussex with his companion, dancer Peter Wyndham Allen, but after Allen’s death in 1990 he left Spring Garden Cottage near Uckfield and moved back to Scotland and settled in Musselburgh. He died in Edinburgh on December 2, 1995.