Brian Moore

Brian Moore was born in Belfast and educated there at St Malachy's College. Having attempted but failed to follow in the footsteps of his father, a surgeon and anti-British Catholic, he estranged his parents further by joining the Air Raid Precautions Corps in wartime Belfast and later serving with the Ministry of War Transport. After the war, Moore worked for the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Poland and, in 1948, emigrated to Canada where he worked as a journalist in Montreal. A Guggenheim Fellowship brought him to New York in 1959 and in 1966 Moore settled permanently in Malibu, California. His first books were several thrillers published under the pseudonyms Bernard Mara and Michael Bryan. Moore's first novel under his own name, Judith Hearne, appeared in 1955 and was later reissued as The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. The story of the descent into delusion of a sexually obsessed Belfast spinster remains one of his most acclaimed works and was made into a film with Dame Maggie Smith in the lead role in 1987. Later novels include The Feast of Lupercal (1957); the powerful study of another imperilled individual, I Am Mary Dunne (1968); The Great Victorian Collection (1975), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; The Colour of Blood (1987), winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; and The Statement (1996), based on the true story of a French war criminal hidden by the Catholic church. Moore's novels are informed by his own experience of Catholicism and a divided Ireland which have issued in themes of confusion over belief and isolation, both physical and spiritual. Moore died in Malibu at the age of 77, leaving behind an unfinished novel about French poet Arthur Rimbaud.