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Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family. This period was fictionalized by his brother Gerald in My Family and Other Animals and described by Durrell himself in Prospero’s Cell. The first of Durrell’s island books, it was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands.

Durrell’s first major novel, The Black Book, was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anais Nin. T. S. Eliot praised the novel and published Durrell’s poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea), which he completed in his new home in Southern France. There, in 1974, he began The Avignon Quintet. When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history.

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