Brian Moore, the Belfast-born novelist, has died at his home in Malibu, California. Aged 77, he was often characterised as "a writer without a country" because he had spent so much of his life living abroad.
Born in Belfast on August 25th, 1921, the son of a doctor, he was the author of 20 novels in a career that spanned over 40 years, starting with The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne published in 1955.
He left Belfast after the second World War, moving first to Poland, where he worked for a relief agency, before emigrating to Canada in 1948. He worked as journalist first in Toronto and later in Montreal before settling finally in California.
"I live as I choose and I write about various items and places," he once said, though he also made it clear that he remained "ineluctably Irish". In a recent TV interview he expressed the wish to be buried in Ireland.
"My life in exile has forced me to become a literary chameleon," he once admitted. His most recent biographer, Irish-born Denis Sampson, took up this theme in the title of his book, Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist, which was published last November.
Movement, displacement and exile are the key words in any consideration of Moore's novels - and of his life, too. One of his pre-occupations was the grey area between what Seamus Heaney calls the "sacro-world" of Ireland and the spiritual sterility of the secular world.
Moore was described by the late Graham Greene as his favourite writer. "There's a quality of realism in Mr Moore's writing which gives the reader a kind of absolute confidence - there will be no intrusion of the author, no character will ever put a foot wrong," he said.
Moore was shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize - in 1987 for a "Greene-ish" novel, The Colour of Blood, set in Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism, and again in 1990 for Lies of Silence, a thriller set in his native Belfast.
"I was lucky", he said in 1983. "I always wanted to be a writer. Between having three countries as an audience and having won a few awards here and there, and actually never being very famous but never totally obscure either, I've had one of the happier writing lives I know."
He is survived in by his wife, Jean, and son, Michael.