C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, of Welsh descent. Known throughout his life by the initials C. S. Lewis, he was baptized in the Church of Ireland but, according to his 1955 memoir Surprised by Joy, fell away from his faith during adolescence, passing through periods of atheism and agnosticism. He served as an officer in the Somerset Light Infantry during the First World War and later participated in the Home Guard during the Second World War. His formal education included study at Campbell College and Malvern College, before he went on to University College, Oxford, where he earned degrees in Classical Philosophy and Literature. Lewis returned to Anglicanism at the age of 32, a conversion he attributed in significant part to the influence of his close friend J. R. R. Tolkien and other associates. He described himself thereafter as an ordinary layman of the Church of England, a designation he maintained for the remainder of his life. In 1956 Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman; she died of cancer four years later at the age of 45. Lewis himself died on 22 November 1963 of kidney failure, at the age of 64. In 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he was honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Lewis held significant academic positions over the course of a distinguished scholarly career. From 1925 to 1954 he served as a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, teaching and researching English literature with a particular focus on medieval and Renaissance texts. In 1954 he accepted the newly created professorship of Medieval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, a post he held until his death in 1963. His academic work encompassed literary criticism and scholarship alongside his better-known popular writings. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and received the Carnegie Medal in Literature, reflecting recognition of his contributions across both scholarly and creative fields. His membership in the Inklings, the informal Oxford literary group that also included J. R. R. Tolkien, provided an intellectual community in which literary and theological ideas were regularly exchanged and debated. Tolkien's influence on Lewis's return to Christian faith is well documented, and the two men's friendship shaped the intellectual atmosphere of mid-twentieth-century Oxford in lasting ways. Lewis wrote more than thirty books across several genres, and these have been translated into more than thirty languages and have sold millions of copies.

Lewis's body of work spans Christian apologetics, fiction, children's literature, and literary scholarship, making him one of the most widely read religious writers of the twentieth century. Among his non-fiction works, Mere Christianity, drawn from wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity that brought him wide acclaim, presented a reasoned defense of core Christian beliefs accessible to a broad popular audience. The Problem of Pain addressed the theological question of suffering, while Miracles engaged philosophical arguments for the possibility of divine intervention in the natural order. The Screwtape Letters, a work of satirical fiction, explored Christian moral psychology through the device of correspondence between a senior and junior demon. The Space Trilogy offered science fiction as a vehicle for theological and moral themes. Most widely read of all are the seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia, which have been adapted for stage, television, radio, and cinema, and which remain foundational texts in Christian imaginative literature. These works consistently engaged questions of natural law, the nature of good and evil, and the rationality of Christian belief, themes that have made Lewis's writings of interest to readers and scholars across denominational boundaries, including within Catholic intellectual life.

Lewis remained Anglican throughout his life and never converted to Roman Catholicism, yet his philosophical writings have been widely cited by Christian scholars across many denominations, including Catholic theologians and apologists who have found in his work a rigorous engagement with natural law reasoning and the philosophical foundations of Christian belief. His apologetic method, which sought to establish common ground among Christians before proceeding to denominational distinctions—an approach reflected in the very title Mere Christianity—has given his work an ecumenical reach unusual for a lay theologian of his era. The Chronicles of Narnia have become foundational texts not only in children's literature but also in discussions of how religious imagination can be communicated through narrative. His radio broadcasts during the Second World War demonstrated that serious theological argument could reach large popular audiences, a legacy that has continued to influence popular Christian communication in subsequent decades. The memorial placed in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey in 2013 marked formal public recognition of his stature as one of Britain's most significant religious writers. His works continue to be studied and read globally, translated into over thirty languages, with the Narnia series representing the most widely disseminated portion of his literary output.