A Verne enthusiast and Fortean who found solace in that old time religion.
Idrisyn Oliver Evans was born 11 November 1894, in the Orange Free State, now part of South Africa. Idrysin—or I. O., as he would go by for most of his adult life—was the son of Harry and Sara Winifred (Sutton). There’s only a little bit of biographical information on his life, most of it not from official sources, but recollections in various compilations of brief author biographies and especially from an extensive correspondence with the science fiction writer (and Fortean) Eric Frank Russell—all of what remains from this relationship is one-sided, only Evans’s letters surviving.
With British understatement, he recalled that his childhood was “not over-happy” and he escaped into books. His father’s collection included Verne, as did a small, mostly religious village library after his parents relocated to England, when Idrisyn was just a child, and he fell in love with the French writer. Evans read A Journey to the Centre of the Earth so many times as to commit much of it to memory. In the course of his education, he learned English and French, and moved on to other writers of the marvelous, Wells and Poe and Kayyam. He was a boy scout. In 1912, finished with school—he did not attend university—Evans joined the civil service.
Idrisyn Oliver Evans was born 11 November 1894, in the Orange Free State, now part of South Africa. Idrysin—or I. O., as he would go by for most of his adult life—was the son of Harry and Sara Winifred (Sutton). There’s only a little bit of biographical information on his life, most of it not from official sources, but recollections in various compilations of brief author biographies and especially from an extensive correspondence with the science fiction writer (and Fortean) Eric Frank Russell—all of what remains from this relationship is one-sided, only Evans’s letters surviving.
With British understatement, he recalled that his childhood was “not over-happy” and he escaped into books. His father’s collection included Verne, as did a small, mostly religious village library after his parents relocated to England, when Idrisyn was just a child, and he fell in love with the French writer. Evans read A Journey to the Centre of the Earth so many times as to commit much of it to memory. In the course of his education, he learned English and French, and moved on to other writers of the marvelous, Wells and Poe and Kayyam. He was a boy scout. In 1912, finished with school—he did not attend university—Evans joined the civil service.