Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian wrote the twenty Aubrey-Maturin novels of the Napoleonic wars at sea and invented most of his own biography. He was born Richard Patrick Russ in Buckinghamshire to a family of German descent, not in Ireland as he let people believe, and he changed his name in 1945 after leaving his first wife and their children, one of whom was severely disabled and died young. The discovery of all this in the late 1990s, while he was alive and famous, was painful and public. He worked for British intelligence during the war, then moved to Collioure in the French Pyrenees, where he lived quietly and translated Simone de Beauvoir and Papillon. Master and Commander appeared in 1969, and the series that followed pairs a bluff, gifted, financially hopeless naval captain with a surgeon who is also a naturalist and an intelligence agent, across two decades of war. The books are unusually exact about seamanship, medicine and period speech, drawing on the Naval Chronicle and on real actions, and Trafalgar sits at the centre of the conflict they narrate though Aubrey misses the battle itself. Their reputation grew slowly and then very fast in the 1990s. Critics have compared the pair to Johnson and Boswell and the social observation to Austen. He translated more than thirty books from French and won the Heinemann Award for his own short stories long before the novels. Master and Commander was commissioned by an American publisher after Forester's death left a gap. The 2003 film took its title from the first novel and its plot mostly from the tenth.

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