Terence Hanbury “Tim” White (29 May 1906 - 17 January 1964) was an English author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958. One of his most memorable stories is the first of that series, The Sword in the Stone, published as a stand-alone book in 1938.

Born in Bombay in British India to English parents, he attended Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, a public school, and Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the scholar and occasional author L. J. Potts. Potts became a lifelong friend and correspondent, and White later referred to him as “the great literary influence in my life.” While at Queens’ College, White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree in English.

White then taught at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire until 1936, when he went to live in a workman’s cottage nearby. In 1939 he moved to Doolistown in County Meath, Ireland, where he lived out the Second World War as a de facto conscientious objector. In 1946, White settled in Alderney, the third largest of the Channel Islands, where he lived for the rest of his life.

He died of heart failure on 17 January 1964 aboard ship in Piraeus (Athens, Greece), en route to Alderney from a lecture tour in the United States. He is buried in First Cemetery of Athens.