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John Robin Jenkins was born on 11 September 1912 in the village of Flemington, near Cambuslang in Lanarkshire. His father died in 1919 and his mother worked as a cook and housekeeper to support her four children.

Jenkins was awarded a bursary to attend Hamilton Academy and studied English at the University of Glasgow, graduating with an MA in 1936. He married in 1937 and taught in Glasgow for some years.

At the outbreak of World War Two he accompanied his primary school pupils on evacuation to the Borders.

By now a committed pacifist, Jenkins registered as a conscientious objector (CO), meaning that he refused to take part in military service.

During the war COs were used in a variety of jobs which helped the war effort without actually engaging in combat. A number of COs did serve in the medical corps as stretcher bearers and were exposed to as much danger as those fighting at the front.

For his war service Jenkins was directed to work for the Forestry Commission. His experience of forestry work in Argyll from 1940 to 1946 is reflected both in his first novel So Gaily Sings the Lark and in the better-known The Cone-Gatherers.

Jenkins's anti-war viewpoint was something he tried to convey through his stories. He saw war as evil caused by men who are themselves evil.

There are themes of good versus evil in nearly all Jenkins's works and the reader can see this developing over the course of Jenkins's literary career.

One of his early short stories, Flowers, tells of a young girl sent to the Highlands to escape the Glasgow bombings. When she stumbles across the bodies of two airmen she becomes exposed to the horrors of the very war she had been sent away to avoid.

The dead airmen are faceless which is symbolic of the horror and facelessness of combat. This is an example of the way Jenkins used metaphors, similes and symbols to great effect in most of his writing.

After the war Jenkins taught in Glasgow and Dunoon. He began to write seriously at this time. In 1957 he moved abroad to teach in colleges in Afghanistan, Spain and Malaysia. These provided settings which he used for several novels in the middle stages of his career.

Jenkins returned to Scotland in 1968 and retired from teaching in 1970 to write full-time. He settled in Toward, near Dunoon, where he lived until his death in 2005.

In all Jenkins produced 30 novels. He was awarded the OBE in 1999, and in 2002 received the Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun award, given annually by the Saltire Society, in recognition of his lifetime achievement as a writer.