Pursued by Furies

Malcolm Lowry was the troubled author of Under the Volcano (1947), a brilliant novel about the last day of an alcoholic former British consul on the Mexican Day of the Dead, the manuscript of which Lowry rescued from the flames when his fisherman's shack burned down in 1944. Lowry's other books were not always so lucky: his first novel, Ultramarine (1930), was stolen after four years' composition and resurrected from a carbon copy; another manuscript, In Ballast to the White Sea, was destroyed in the 1944 fire. An early draft of In Ballast was discovered this century and published in 2014. Lowry's life, like his work, was often lost to chaos; Gordon Bowker's 1994 biography is a masterful account of a life spent adrift.

After reading English, Sociology and Philosophy at Nottingham and London Universities, Gordon Bowker worked as a lecturer as well as writing dramas and documentaries for radio and television. He is now a full-time author and journalist. He has written several books about Malcolm Lowry and biographies of George Orwell and Lawrence Durrell.