Alastair Niven became Principal of Cumberland Lodge in Windsor in February 2001. Prior to this he had been Director of Literature at the British Council for 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.

Alastair 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 two 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. He is also President of English PEN. He has been Chairman of the executive committee of the United Kingdom Council for Overseas Student Affairs. He was a founder member of the Home Office Arts in Prisons Committee. For thirteen years he was the Editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

For several years Dr. Niven was the Chairman of the Southern African Development Education Trust (SABDET), and was a member of the jury which selected Africa's 100 Best books of the Twentieth-century. He was awarded an OBE in 2000.

LCIS TRUSTEES & STAFF