Farrell, J. G. (1935-1979), was an English novelist known for his trilogy of historical novels that portray the decline of the British Empire. Critics have praised the irony and often savage humor of his fiction.
Farrell won the 1973 Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s highest literary award, for the second novel in the trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973). Farrell set the work in India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The novel uses fictional diaries, letters, and reports to portray the physical and psychological pressures endured by a British military unit during a three-month siege by Indian forces.
The first novel in the trilogy, Troubles (1970), is set in 1919 in a hotel in County Wicklow, Ireland. The hotel houses members of the British military who are fighting Irish rebels. The fighting results in the destruction of the once-luxurious hotel, a symbol of the destruction of the British way of life. Troubles received the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010, a special award honoring books published in 1970 when the rules for the Booker Prize—at that time called the Man Booker Prize—were changed. The third novel, The Singapore Grip (1978), uses real and fictional characters as it describes the fall of the United Kingdom colony of Singapore to Japanese forces during World War II (1939-1945).
James Gordon Farrell was born on Jan. 25, 1935, in Liverpool, England. He earned a B.A. degree from Oxford University in 1960. He began his career as a novelist in 1963 with the publication of A Man from Elsewhere. He had contracted polio during his first term at Oxford. For his next novel, The Lung (1965), he drew on his own experiences to describe the effects of polio on a young patient.
Farrell moved to Ireland in 1979. Shortly after arriving, he accidentally drowned on Aug. 11, 1979, while fishing. His unfinished novel The Hill Station was published in 1981, after his death.
