A BRITISH novelist who drowned when he was swept off rocks while fishing in Ireland 30 years ago is to have a book of his letters to friends published by Cork University Press.
The novelist JG Farrell – known to his friends as Jim – was drowned on August 11th, 1979, when he was swept off rocks by a sudden storm while fishing in Bantry Bay, west Cork.
The Liverpool-born author, who was of Irish descent, had taken up residence in the Sheep’s Head Peninsula a few months before his death. He was 44 when he died.
Had he lived to write more, assessed the Daily Telegraph obituary at the time, “he might well have been regarded as the greatest historical novelist of his generation”.
Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie said last year there was no question that if Farrell had lived, he “would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language”.
The Siege of Krishnapur, the second of Farrell’s Empire trilogy, won the Booker Prize in 1973. It was selected as one of only six previous winners to compete in the 2008 international “Best of Booker” competition.
The strength of American interest in Farrell’s books is underlined by the inclusion of all of his trilogy novels in the Classics imprint of the New York Review of Books. JG Farrell in His own Words, Selected Letters and Diaries contains previously unpublished letters to a wide range of friends.
They give the reader a glimpse of the private man.
The letters were written in the course of his life, right up to the day before his death. The book will be published in October.