Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry was a British writer born in Birkenhead, on the Wirral, on 28 July 1909. He grew up in a comfortable family, went to sea briefly as a young man, and studied at Cambridge, where he began to publish fiction. His adult life was restless. He lived in Mexico, the United States and British Columbia, and spent long periods in England and Europe. All through these years he struggled with heavy drinking, which shaped both his health and his work. He wrote slowly, revised constantly, and left many unfinished manuscripts, some of which were edited and published after his death. His masterpiece is Under the Volcano, a novel of a single day in Mexico that is often counted among the finest of the twentieth century. His writing is dense, musical and highly personal, drawing on his own travels, failures and hopes. He died on 26 June 1957, at the age of 47. Today he is admired as a writer who turned private torment into ambitious, haunting art.