Lawrence George Durrell CBE (/ˈdʊrəl, ˈdʌr-/;[1] 27 February 1912[2] – 7 November 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer.

[5] On 22 January 1935, Durrell married art student Nancy Isobel Myers (1912–1983), with whom he briefly ran a photographic studio in London.

[7] Durrell was always unhappy in England, and in March of that year he persuaded his new wife, and his mother and younger siblings, to move to the Greek island of Corfu.

In early 1936, Durrell and Nancy moved to the White House, a fisherman's cottage on the shore of Corfu's northeastern coast at Kalami, then a tiny fishing village.

The Durrell family's friend Theodore Stephanides, a Greek doctor, scientist and poet, was a frequent guest, and Miller stayed at the White House in 1939.

Lawrence, in his turn, refers only briefly to his brother Leslie, and he does not mention that his mother and two other siblings were also living on Corfu in those years.

The accounts cover a few of the same topics; for example, both Gerald and Lawrence describe the roles played in their lives by the Corfiot taxi driver Spyros Halikiopoulos and Theodore Stephanides.

[11]: 260 In August 1937, Lawrence and Nancy travelled to the Villa Seurat in Paris, France, to meet Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

Together with Alfred Perles, Nin, Miller, and Durrell "began a collaboration aimed at founding their own literary movement.

Their projects included The Shame of the Morning and the Booster, a country club house organ that the Villa Seurat group appropriated "for their own artistic ...

"[12] They also started the Villa Seurat Series in order to publish Durrell's Black Book, Miller's Max and the White Phagocytes, and Nin's Winter of Artifice.

[9] Durrell's first novel of note, The Black Book: An Agon, was strongly influenced by Miller; it was published in Paris in 1938.

In the story, the main character Lawrence Lucifer struggles to escape the spiritual sterility of dying England and finds Greece to be a warm and fertile environment.

At the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, Durrell's mother and siblings returned to England, while Nancy and he remained on Corfu.

[17] In May 1945, Durrell obtained a posting to Rhodes, the largest of the Dodecanese islands that Italy had taken over from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire in 1912 during the Balkan Wars.

Durrell set up house with Eve in the little gatekeeper's lodge of an old Turkish cemetery, just across the road from the building used by the British Administration.

His co-habitation with Eve Cohen could be discreetly ignored by his employer, while the couple gained from staying within the perimeter security zone of the main building.

[18] He returned to London with Eve in the summer of 1948, around the time that Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia broke ties with Stalin's Cominform.

Durrell moved to Cyprus with their daughter Sappho Jane, buying a house and taking a position teaching English literature at the Pancyprian Gymnasium to support his writing.

Justine, Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), deal with events before and during the Second World War in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

The Times Literary Supplement review of the Quartet stated: "If ever a work bore an instantly recognizable signature on every sentence, this is it."

[20] In 1962, however, he did receive serious consideration, along with Robert Graves, Jean Anouilh, and Karen Blixen, but ultimately lost to John Steinbeck.

That year, Durrell was living in the United States and serving as the Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology.

[23] The middle novel of the quincunx, Constance, or Solitary Practices (1981), which portrays France in the 1940s under the German occupation, was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982.

After Durrell's death, it emerged that Sappho's diaries included allusions to an alleged incestuous relationship with her father.

He later refused an honour as a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, because he felt his "conservative, reactionary and right-wing" political views might be a cause for embarrassment.

[citation needed] In 1966 Durrell and many other former and present British residents became classified as non-patrial, as a result of an amendment to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

[3] The law was covertly intended to reduce migration from India, Pakistan, and the West Indies, but Durrell was also penalized by it and refused citizenship.

[3] As The Guardian reported in 2002, Durrell in 1966 was "one of the best selling, most celebrated English novelists of the late 20th century" and "at the height of his fame".

Thomas had earlier edited an anthology of writings, letters and poetry by Durrell, published as Spirit of Place (1969).