Short answers, pulled from the story.
Roald Dahl was born on the 13th of September 1916 at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road, in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales. His parents were Norwegian immigrants; his father Harald was a wealthy shipbroker who had emigrated from Sarpsborg, Norway, and his mother Sofie came from Christiania, modern-day Oslo. Dahl was named after the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen.
On the 19th of September 1940, Dahl was forced to attempt an emergency landing in the Egyptian desert after running low on fuel and failing to locate his squadron's forward airstrip 30 miles south of Mersa Matruh. His Gloster Gladiator's undercarriage struck a boulder, his skull was fractured and his nose smashed, and he was temporarily blinded. He remained blind for six weeks due to massive brain swelling. A subsequent RAF inquiry revealed he had been directed to the wrong location entirely.
Dahl served as assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. from 1942. He supplied intelligence directly to Prime Minister Winston Churchill about President Roosevelt's thinking, and also provided intelligence to Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, codename Intrepid, whose British Security Coordination organisation was part of MI6. He later worked alongside Ian Fleming and David Ogilvy promoting Britain's interests and countering isolationist sentiment in the United States.
Dahl's first published work arose from a meeting with novelist C. S. Forester in Washington in 1942. Forester had been commissioned by The Saturday Evening Post to write a story based on Dahl's war experiences and asked Dahl to jot down some RAF anecdotes as source material. Forester decided the notes Dahl produced were good enough to publish as written. The Post bought the piece for US$1,000 and published it on the 1st of August 1942 as "Shot Down Over Libya".
The Wade-Dahl-Till valve was a device designed to improve the shunt used to treat hydrocephalus. Dahl became involved in its development after his son Theo was struck by a taxicab in New York City on the 5th of December 1960 at four months old and developed the condition as a result. Dahl collaborated with hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade and Great Ormond Street Hospital neurosurgeon Kenneth Till to create it, and the valve was used successfully in almost 3,000 children around the world.
Roald Dahl's books have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide and have been published in 63 languages. In 2000, Dahl topped a list of Britain's favourite authors, and in a 2017 UK poll he was named the greatest storyteller of all time, ranking ahead of Dickens, Shakespeare, Rowling and Spielberg. In September 2021, Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company in a deal worth more than £500 million.