James Gordon Farrell was born in Liverpool in 1935, to an Anglo–Irish family. They moved to Dublin shortly after the end of World War II, and James subsequently lived in France, Canada and London. In 1979 he went to live on the Sheep's Head peninsula, on the coast of County Cork; a few months later he fell into the sea while fishing from some rocks, and drowned (in Bantry Bay).
He was, in one sense, the first person to win the Booker Prize twice, although he didn't live to realise it. Having won in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur, in 2010 (31 years after his tragic death) he won the so–called 'Lost Booker' prize for his 1970 novel, Troubles.
© Haydn Thompson 2021