ALASTAIR NIVEN Dr. Alastair Niven, OBE, became Principal of the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Foundation of St. Catherine's at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor on 1 February 2001. Prior to this, he had been the Director of Literature at the British Council for nearly four years. He has held several public positions, including being Director of Literature at the Arts Council of Great Britain (latterly the Arts Council of England) for ten years, and Director General of the Africa Centre from 1978 to 1984. Dr. Niven began his career as an academic with positions at the Universities of Ghana (where he had been a Commonwealth Scholar), Leeds and Stirling. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and has held honorary positions at the Universities of Exeter, Warwick and London. He has written several books including 2 on D.H. Lawrence and two on Indian fiction. He is the author of over fifty articles on aspects of Commonwealth and post-colonial literature, and has also written extensively about the welfare of overseas students. A judge of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1994, Alastair Niven is now Chairman of the commonwealth Writers Prize Advisory Committee. For thirteen years he was the editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Dr. Niven is the Chairman of the Southern African Development Education Trust (SABDET). ALA Bulletin: A Publication of the African Literature Association, Volume 28, 2002, page 16.
