Clavell, James

(US, 1924–94)

Born in Sydney, Australia, Clavell grew up in England and took American citizenship in 1963 after moving to the United States to work in the film industry. Begin with King Rat (1962), his first novel, in which his experiences as a prisoner of war in the notorious Changi jail, Singapore, underlie a story about extreme privation and strategies for survival. Tai Pan (1966), his lavishly expansive treatment of the founding of Hong Kong in 1841, is the first of several fat historical novels set in the Far East. These include Shogun (1975), in which a seventeenth-century English seaman stranded in Japan rises to a position of high authority under the ruling warlord, and Gai-Jin (1993), set in Yokohama in the 1860s amid the conflict between various European interests over trading with Japan.

Amin Maalouf, Alexander Cordell, Dorothy Dunnett  DH