Daphne Hardy Henrion

Born in 1917, Daphne Hardy Henrion was educated in The Hague and at French and German schools. She left school aged 14 to study art privately in the Netherlands for a year with Marian Gobius and Albert Termote. From 1934 to 1937 she attended the Royal Academy Schools in London, scooping a Gold Medal and Travelling Scholarship which took her in 1938 to France and Italy.

In the summer of 1939 in Paris, through mutual friends she met the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler and they became close.  In the chaos following the declaration of war and the subsequent harassment and internment of Koestler by the French, she managed to save a copy of the translation and smuggle it to England in 1940, where in the following year it was published under the title Darkness at Noon. The title for the book was her idea.

During the war she worked for the Ministry of Information and after her release she began to establish her artistic reputation with a number of solo exhibitions and also with exhibits at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions. In 1947 she married the graphic designer Henri Kay Henrion but left him in the 1970s. They had two sons and a daughter. From 1980 she was a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.