Author Details
Author Details
De Bernieres, Louis
"Louis de BerniŠres was born in London in 1954. After leaving school at 18 he went to Sandhurst (the British army officer training college) but left after 4 months. He graduated from the Victoria University of Manchester and took a postgraduate certificate in education at Leicester Polytechnic, followed by a MA (Master of Arts) at the University of London.
He now writes full-time but before this he held a variety of jobs including landscape gardener, motorcycle messenger and car mechanic. For a time he taught English in Colombia which provided the inspiration for his first three novels: The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Se¤or Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992). All three novels are written in a style heavily influenced by South American literature.
In 1993, Granta magazine (a quarterly literary magazine published in London and New York) named him one of the 20 Best Young British Novelists. Captain Corelli's Mandolin was published in 1994 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book and was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year. It became a worldwide bestseller and has been translated into at least 11 languages. A movie adaptation of the novel was released in 2001 (although de BerniŠres was not happy with the adaptation). It has also been adapted for the stage. In 2001, he published Red Dog - a collection of stories inspired by a statue of a dog that he saw at an Australian writer's festival a few years earlier.
In addition to his novels, de BerniŠres wrote the introduction to The Book of Job, one in a series of books reprinted from the Bible and published as separate stories in 1998, and a play performed on BBC Radio 4 in 1999 called Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World. He also regularly contributes short stories to various magazines and newspapers. Birds Without Wings was published to great critical acclaim in 2004. He lives in London."
