Nevil Shute Norway was born on 17 January 1899 in Ealing, London, second child of Arthur Hamilton Norway. Nevil suffered from a stammer which, although it lessened, was still noticeable later in life. It prevented him from being commissioned in the British Army in mid-1918 upon his completion of training at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He served as a private in the 1st Reserve Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, then entered Balliol College, Oxford where he read engineering, graduating in 1923.

From an early age Norway showed an interest in aeroplanes. Whilst at Oxford he undertook unpaid work for the de Havilland Aircraft Co. in university holidays and started regular employment with the firm in January 1923. During this time he learned to fly and began writing novels. Norway completed his first novel in 1923, and another in the following year, but neither was published. In 1924 he joined Vickers Ltd as chief calculator for Barnes Wallis.

Norway now began writing regularly in his spare time and his third novel, Marazan, was published in 1926. Feeling that his colleagues might think his writing compromised his commitment to his engineering work, he chose to publish as Nevil Shute, as he did for all his subsequent writing. On 7 March 1931 Norway married Frances Mary Heaton. Later that same year he established his own aircraft construction company, Airspeed Ltd, which became one of the major aircraft-makers in Britain by the outbreak of World War II. In 1938 he was asked to resign from Airspeed with a generous settlement which enable him to devote himself to full-time writing, publishing seven novels in as many years. After World War II his work became even more commercially successful. The Chequer Board (1947) preceded No Highway (1948), the subject of which—the problems of aircraft design and the effects of metal fatigue—was well-known to him.

In 1948 Norway flew his own plane to Australia. Back home, he felt oppressed by British taxation and decided that he and his family would emigrate. With his wife and two daughters, he settled in 1950 on farmland south-east of Melbourne, Australia. His greatest successes dated from this time, and most of them had Australian settings: A Town Like Alice (1950), Round the Bend (1951), which Norway considered his most important work, The Far Country (1952) and In the Wet (1953).

Norway died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 12 January 1960.