AustLit

Kenneth Hayles was educated at Ryde in England. Having lost an arm in an accident in 1939, he was ineligible for military service and worked as an air raid casualty clerk at a hospital in Portsmouth during the war. After the war, he embarked on a series of vocations, including running a car-hire and air-charter business in Portsmouth, and becoming a writer in London, after his radio play 'Abandon Aircraft' was successfully broadcast in 1944.

Soon afterwards Hayles and his wife came to Australia, where they bought a hair-dressing business in Sydney before moving to Brisbane and joining with an elderly prospector to excavate a tin mine in Cape York. After drought and then floods made the mine impossible to work, Hayles returned to Brisbane where he became a salesman for an electrical firm and began to write his novel The Long Reach. He lived in England again from 1952 to 1964, and during this time he completed his novel and went on to publish four more. As Kenneth R. Hayles he also wrote a number of detective screenplays for both film and television, including episodes for the popular series The Saint and Stryker of the Yard..

In 1965 he returned to Australia to live. He worked for the Commonwealth Film Unit in the 1970s and also wrote episodes for a number of TV series: Skippy, The Rovers, Class of '74, Class of '75, Number 96.