Louis de Bernières

Louis de Bernières (born 8 December 1954) is an English novelist. He is known for his 1994 historical war novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin. In 1993 de Bernières was selected as one of the "20 Best of Young British Novelists", part of a promotion in Granta magazine. Captain Corelli's Mandolin was published in the following year, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. It was also shortlisted for the 1994 Sunday Express Book of the Year. It has been translated into over 11 languages and is an international best-seller.

On 16 July 2008, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in the Arts by the De Montfort University in Leicester, which he had attended when it was Leicester Polytechnic.

Politically, he identifies himself as Eurosceptic and has voiced his support for the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union. Louis H. P. de Bernières-Smart was born near Woolwich in London in 1954 and grew up in Surrey. The name de Bernières is inherited from a French Huguenot ancestor. He was educated at Grenham House school—where he reported the pupils were subjected to "hellish abuse"—and at Bradfield College, and joined the army when he was 18, but left after four months of the officer training course at Sandhurst. He next attended the Victoria University of Manchester and the Institute of Education, University of London. Before he began to write full-time he held a wide variety of jobs, including being a mechanic, a motorcycle messenger and an English teacher in Colombia. As of 2008 he lived near Bungay in Suffolk.In 2009 he separated from his partner, actress Cathy Gill, who took custody of their children, Robin and Sophie. Eventually, he gained equal custodial rights. He has never remarried.

De Bernières is an avid musician. He plays flute, mandolin, clarinet and guitar, although he considers himself an "enthusiastic but badly-educated and erratic" amateur. His literary work often references music and the composers he admires, such as the guitar works of Villa-Lobos and Antonio Lauro in the Latin American trilogy, and the mandolin works of Vivaldi and Hummel in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. He has dystonia, which affects his playing.