'John Rowan Wilson' is a pseudonym for John Robinson Wilson, the son of John Cooke Wilson, wholesale butcher, and his wife, Lilian (née Robinson). Wilson was educated at Stonyhurst College and Leeds University. He graduated in medicine in 1943 and worked briefly at hospitals in Leeds and Sheffield before joining the merchant service as a ship's surgeon. He spent two years with the Orient Line before returning to Leeds for surgical training. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1951 and spent two further years working as a trainee surgeon in London.
Wilson's first novel, A Bed of Thorns, was published in 1953 and from that time on he published a book every two or three years. All but one were works of fiction, the exception being Margin of Safety (1963), an account of the development of the polio vaccines. The Round Voyage (1957) is about shipboard life as Wilson would have experienced it during his work as a ship's surgeon. The fictional ship, Cape York, is on its London-Sydney run and Wilson's descriptions of Sydney suggest that he would have come ashore in Australia during similar voyages of his own on the Orient Line and become familiar with the city and its environs.
