Fermor, Patrick Leigh (1915-2011), was a British author and world traveler. His travel writings have been praised for their exuberant literary style, scholarly knowledge, and skill at re-creating the sights and sounds of a particular place.
Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor was born in London on Feb. 11, 1915. He was expelled from King’s School, Canterbury, and at the age of 17 set out to walk from Rotterdam in the Netherlands to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in Turkey. Many years later, he wrote an award-winning account of this walking trip in A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1985).
At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Leigh Fermor enlisted in the Irish Guards. He was posted to the Balkans in 1940. He spent an eventful two years in Albania, Greece, and the Greek island of Crete, where he lived disguised as a shepherd behind enemy lines helping to organize the resistance. He took part in the capture of General Karl Kreipe, commander of the German forces on Crete. After the war ended in 1945, Leigh Fermor spent a year traveling in the Caribbean and Central America. His first book, The Traveller’s Tree (1950), describes the author’s adventures in the Caribbean. It won the Heinemann Foundation Prize. His other books include Mai: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958), which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966); and Three Letters from the Andes (1992). Leigh Fermor died on June 10, 2011.
