He was born at West Byfleet, Surrey, and studied at Cranleigh School and Wadham College, Oxford. He did two years of National Service in the Royal Air Force.
His jobs included teaching English, bookselling and journalism. In the 1970s he lived and worked in the United States, where he taught English at the American College in Paris.
He left in 1980 to concentrate on writing full-time, in a series of cottages in Kent and Norfolk.
Rowledge's first published story, "The Letter", appeared in Penguin New Writing 32 (1958). His first novel was A Game of Hide-and-Seek (1965).
He was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize:
* A Game of Hide-and-Seek (1965)
* God on the Rocks (1980)
His first two novels (A Game of Hide-and-Seek and The Prince of Tales) are set in a boys' boarding school. Many of his subsequent novels involve a male protagonist trying to discover some truth or meaning in his life, sometimes through a woman.
Novels
* A Game of Hide-and-Seek (1965)
* The Prince of Tales (1966)
* The Bedfordshire Hustings (1968)
* A Kind of Treason (1971)
* Something of the Glory (1973)
* The Betrayers (1974)
* To the Islands (1976)
* God on the Rocks (1980)
* In Time with the Territory (1982)
* Children, Children! (1985)
* Nothing Ever Changes (1987)
* An Inch of Gold (1989)
* The Sleeping Sword (1991)
* The Angel's Fury (1992)
* Shadow of the King (1994)
* The Devil Is Loose (1995)
* The Shadow of Your Son (1997)
* The Day of Reckoning (1999)
* The Third Miracle (2002)
* Kingdom Come (2004)
Short stories
* The Best Man and Other Stories (1977)
* The End of the World and Other Stories (1990)
Non-Fiction
* The Unremembered Dead (1990) about the victims of the First World War
* Their Name Liveth For Evermore: The Great Book of Remembrance (1994)