In 1994, before Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001) surfaced, Louis de Bernières was "a dejected schoolteacher" (his own words) who had published three well-received novels and won some prizes too. But after the book became a British publishing phenomenon, his life changed.
He immediately quit the classroom and started learning how to cope with fame. Articles, interviews, personal appearances and now a movie have made it difficult to complete another book. Still, success on the order of Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001) is rare, and all the more heartwarming when it's unexpected.
The novel was born of a simple vacation de Bernières took with his girlfriend to the island of Cephallonia. He explains. "We took a bus tour. After the guide casually mentioned an earthquake back in 1953, I was interested and almost immediately started looking for a story. In exploring the island, I soon learned it was a place full of ghosts. Whole villages lay in rubble, abandoned after a devastating earthquake in 1953. Cephallonia has suffered these and other catastrophes going back a thousand years. The whole region has been drenched in mythology. Odysseus supposedly made his boats out of Cephallonian pine.
"In a café, I watched a beautiful girl and decided someone like that should be in the novel. Later, I learned about the Italian invasion, and of their massacre by the Germans. It was the beginning of the Greek Civil War."
The novel - published in 1994 by Secker & Warburg - received some excellent reviews, but sold modestly in hardcover. But something about it touched a vibrant nerve in the British book-reading public. It climbed onto best seller lists where it remained, incredibly, for more than three years. It has since been published in the U.S. - by Pantheon/Vintage - and translated into 22 languages.
The U. S. literary reception was warmer. Reviews were good and the late Joseph Heller called it "a wonderful, hypnotic novel of fabulous scope and tremendous, iridescent charm." In 1995, the prestigious Lannan Foundation gave Louis de Bernières its Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He also received - for the third time - the Common-wealth Writers Prize. Previously, in 1993, he was selected as one of Britain's 20 Best Young Novelists; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year in 1994.
The author's three previous novels, set in South America, are a sequence. They are: The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991), and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992).
Louis de Bernières was born in London in 1954. He graduated from the Victoria University of Manchester, took a postgraduate certificate in education at Leicester Polytechnic and passed his MA, with distinction, at the University of London. After four "disastrous" months in the British army, he left for a village in Colombia where he worked as a teacher in the morning and a cowboy in the afternoon. Returning to England, he held such jobs as landscape gardener, mechanic, officer cadet at Sandhurst, and schoolteacher.
De Bernières loves music and, if given another life, would choose composing as his profession. He plays the mandolin - and also builds the instrument.
