Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdychiv, then in the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. The Russian authorities exiled his father, a writer and activist, and both parents died before Conrad was twelve. His mother's brother became his guardian.

At 16 he left for Marseille to go to sea. He served on French and then British ships for about twenty years, qualified as a captain and became a British subject. In 1890 he took a job on a river steamer in the Congo Free State, a journey that left him ill and shaken.

That trip became Heart of Darkness (1899), in which the sailor Marlow travels up an African river to find Kurtz, an ivory trader who has made himself a god to the local people. The novella argues that European colonialism was greed and cruelty dressed up as civilization. In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe called the book racist, and that charge is still debated. Conrad wrote all his books in English, his third language. He died in Kent in 1924.