Forrest Reid

Forrest Reid (24 June 1875, Belfast, Ireland – 4 January 1947, Warrenpoint, County Down, Northern Ireland) was an Irish novelist, literary critic and translator. He was a leading pre-war novelist of boyhood and is still acclaimed as a noted Ulster novelist, being awarded the 1944 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Young Tom.

Early life and education

Born in Belfast, he was the youngest son of a Protestant family of twelve, six of whom survived. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. His father, Robert Reid (1825–1881), was the manager of a felt works, having failed as a shipowner at Liverpool, and came from a well-established upper-middle-class Ulster family; his mother, Frances Matilda, was his father's second wife. She was the daughter of Captain Robert Parr, of the 54th Regiment of Foot, of the landed gentry Parr family of Shropshire, related to Catherine Parr, last wife of King Henry VIII. Reid entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1905, graduating BA in medieval and modern languages in 1908. He returned to Belfast, and met E. M. Forster, who remained a lifelong friend, in February 1912. After graduation Forster continued to visit Reid, who was then settled back in Belfast. In 1952, Forster traveled to Belfast to unveil a plaque commemorating Forrest Reid's life (at 13 Ormiston Crescent).

Critical standing

A "Forrest Reid Collection" is held at the University of Exeter, consisting of first editions of all his works and books about Reid. Many of his original manuscripts are in the archives of the Belfast Central Library. In 2008, Queen's University Belfast catalogued a large collection of Forrest Reid documentary material it had recently acquired, including many letters from E.M. Forster.