Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in what is now Ukraine, to Polish parents exiled for their politics. He went to sea at sixteen, served in French and then British merchant ships for twenty years, rising to master, and began to write in English — his third language — in his late thirties. Almayer’s Folly (1895), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911) are among his works. He lived in the south of England, mostly in Kent, from 1896 until his death.