Brian Moore (novelist)

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Brian Moore (novelist) : biography

25 August 1921 – 11 January 1999

Other novels by Moore were adapted for the screen, including Intent to Kill, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Catholics, Black Robe, Cold Heaven, and The Statement. He co-wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and wrote The Blood of Others, based on the novel Le Sang des autres by Simone de Beauvoir.

Death

Brian Moore died in 1999 at his home in Malibu, California, aged 77, from pulmonary fibrosis. He had been working on a novel about the 19th-century French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Legacy

The Creative Writers Network in Northern Ireland launched in 1996 the Brian Moore Short Story Awards, which are now open to all authors of Irish descent. Previous judges have included Glenn Patterson, Lionel Shriver, Carlo Gebler and Maeve Binchy.

Moore has been the subject of two biographies, Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist (1998) by Denis Sampson and Brian Moore: A Biography (2002) by Patricia Craig. Brian Moore and the Meaning of the Past (2007) by Patrick Hicks provides a critical retrospective of Moore’s works.

Information about the publishing of Moore’s novel, Judith Hearne, and the break-up of his marriage can be found in Diana Athill’s memoir, Stet (2000).Athill, Diana (2000) Stet: a memoir, London: Granta ISBN 1-86207-388-0

In 1975 Moore arranged for his literary materials, letters and documents to be deposited in the Special Collections Division of the University of Calgary Library, an inventory of which (The Brian Moore Papers: First Accession and Second Accession) was published by the University of Calgary Press in 1987. Moore’s archives, which include unfilmed screenplays, drafts of various novels, working notes, a 42-volume journal (1957–1998), and his correspondence , are now at The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin.

Acclaim

Graham Greene said that Moore was his favourite living novelist, though Moore began to regard the label as "a bit of an albatross".