Gerald Durrell (Gerald Malcolm Durrell) Biography

English writer and zoologist, born in Jamshedpur, India, the brother of Lawrence Durrell. In 1928 his family returned to England, and from 1933 they lived mainly in Europe. Durrell's experiences on Corfu formed the basis for his comic autobiography, My Family and Other Animals (1956). His many zoological expeditions took him to the Cameroons, British Guiana, Sierra Leone, Paraguay, and Argentina, all of which he described in his numerous books. These include The Drunken Forest (1956), The Overloaded Ark (1957), A Zoo in My Luggage (1960), Island Zoo (1961), Encounters with Animals (1963), Three Singles to Adventure (1964), Birds, Beasts and Relatives (1969), Catch Me A Colobus (1972), Beasts in the Belfry (1973), and others. In 1959 he founded the Jersey Zoological Park, about which he wrote in The Ark's Anniversary (1990). In The Aye-Aye and I (1992) he recounted his experiences in Madagascar to save a rare mammal.