Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on 3 December 1857 in Terekhove, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine, to a Polish family. His father was a writer and patriot who was exiled for resisting Russian rule, and Conrad was orphaned young. At sixteen he left for France, and after some years at sea he joined the British merchant navy, rising to the rank of captain. He became a British subject in 1886.

English was his third language, yet he turned to writing in it in his thirties and settled in England. His fiction draws on his years at sea and on voyages to Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. He is admired for stories that probe moral doubt, loyalty, isolation and the limits of empire, often told through layered narrators. He died on 3 August 1924, and his influence on later novelists has been very wide.