John Spurling

John Spurling (1936–2022) was a British playwright, novelist, and art critic. He studied classics at Oxford and worked for many years as a playwright, with plays performed at the Royal Court and the National Theatre. As an art critic he wrote widely about painting and was the author of studies of Anthony Blunt and John Bratby. The Ten Thousand Things (2015, Overlook Press) is his novel imagining the life of Wang Meng, one of the Four Masters of Chinese Yuan dynasty landscape painting, set during the final decades of Mongol rule and the founding of the Ming dynasty. Rich with the philosophy and aesthetics of Chinese painting, it won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2015. Spurling's novel drew on years of study of Chinese art history and the philosophy of landscape painting. He was married to biographer Hilary Spurling.