J. G. Farrell

Farrell was born in Liverpool to an Anglo-Irish family and contracted polio playing rugby at Oxford, an ordeal that permanently weakened him and fed his early novel The Lung. He lived frugally in France and London, writing full-time on almost nothing.

The Empire Trilogy made him: Troubles (1970) watches the Irish War of Independence from a rotting County Wexford hotel; The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) won the Booker; he used the acceptance speech to needle the sponsor's own colonial sugar interests; The Singapore Grip (1978) closed with the 1942 surrender.

In 1979 he moved to Bantry Bay in Ireland and within months was swept from the rocks while fishing, drowning at forty-four. In 2010 Troubles won the retrospective 'Lost Man Booker': two Bookers, one posthumous.