J. G. Farrell(1935–1979)

James Gordon Farrell was born at Wallasey on Merseyside on 25 January 1935, second son of an Anglo-Irish accountant of County Galway descent working for the Liverpool branch of Shell-Mex. The family kept both Liverpool-English and west-Irish identities and moved back to Dublin in 1936; he was schooled in Dublin and at English schools, finishing at the Rossall School in Lancashire.

He went up to Brasenose College, Oxford in 1956 to read modern languages. He contracted poliomyelitis in his first year, which left a permanent muscular weakness in the upper body that he carried for the rest of his life. He took his degree in 1960 and at twenty-six moved to Paris, beginning the novelist's career on a typewriter and an English-teaching sideline.

After two early novels he later set aside, the career turned in 1968 on a Harkness Fellowship to Yale, which gave him the year in which he wrote the first of what became the Empire trilogy. Troubles (1970), the Anglo-Irish Big House novel set at the fictional Majestic Hotel on the Wexford coast across the 1919 to 1921 war, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was retrospectively awarded the Lost Booker in 2010, and is now generally regarded as the finest of the three.

The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), the fictional account of an Indian Mutiny siege based on the Lucknow and Cawnpore precedents, won the Booker Prize in 1973. The Singapore Grip (1978), the Fall-of-Singapore novel, completed the trilogy. He had begun a fourth Empire novel, The Hill Station, after moving to a coastal house at Bantry on the west Cork coast in 1977.

He died at Bantry on 11 August 1979, forty-four years old, the fourth novel left unfinished and published in 1981 from the manuscript and notebooks. His reputation has risen continuously since: the three completed Empire novels are, by modern critical consensus, among the most significant English-language fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. The Farrell name, the Irish-midlands patronymic Ó Fearghail, he carried from a Wallasey Shell-Mex accountant's household into the post-imperial English-language novel of the slow British decline.