Louis De Bernières Biography

British novelist, born in London, educated at the University of Manchester and the University of London. He taught in Columbia for two years and chose South America as the setting for some of his novels. The first of these, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), is set in an imaginary South American country run by gangsters and corrupt politicians and combines magic realism with political satire. Also set in South America are Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991), an indictment of the cocaine trade, and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992), which deals with the persecution of certain members of a small town by a latter-day Inquisition. Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994) focuses on the inhabitants of the Greek island of Cephalonia following the Italian invasion during the Second World War.