Christopher Isherwood (prior to 1946 Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood) (August 26, 1904 – January 4, 1986), Anglo-American novelist, was born in the ancestral seat of his family, Wybersley Hall, High Lane, near Stockport in the north west of England. The son of landed gentry, his army officer father was killed in the First World War.

At school he met W. H. Auden who became his lifelong friend. He later studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he met Stephen Spender who was at Oxford University with Auden. Rejecting his upper-class background and attracted to men, he moved to Berlin, the capital of the young Weimar Republic, drawn by its deserved reputation for sexual freedom. He worked as private tutor while writing the novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains and a series of short stories collected under the title Goodbye to Berlin. These provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera and the subsequent musical Cabaret. A memorial plaque to Isherwood has been erected on the house in Schöneberg, Berlin where he lived. In September 1931 the poet William Plomer introduced him to E.M. Forster; they became close and Forster served as a mentor to the young writer.

Auden and Isherwood travelled first to China in 1938, then emigrated to the United States in 1939. (The convenient timing of this move, coming just as Britain was about to be engulfed in the Second World War, placed them under a cloud and their reputations suffered for a time.) Isherwood settled in California where he embraced Hinduism. Together with Swami Prabhavananda he produced several Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography Ramakrishna and his Followers, and novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with themes and characters of Vedanta, karma, reincarnation and the Upanishadic quest.

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