Brian Moore was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1921. He has been described as "one of the few authentic masters of the Irish contemporary novel." The son of a prominent surgeon, the first Catholic to sit in the cloister of Queen's University in Belfast, and a nurse in Donegal, and nephew of a prominent Irish nationalist, grew up in a large Catholic family, though he abjured his faith at an early age. After serving in the British Army during World War II, in 1948 he emigrated to Canada, where he became a writer. His first really "literary" novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), was rejected by ten American publishers and had to be published in England, although it would later become a real success, and would even lead to a film starring Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. The novel would also win the Authors' Club First Novel Award. In 1966 he moved to the spacious wooden and stone house on the shores of the Pacific that would inspire the poem of his friend Seamus Heaney "Remembering Malibu." There he dedicated himself to writing screenplays for the cinema, such as Alfred Hitchcock's "Cortina rasgada", or La sangre de los otros, directed by Claude Chabrol and based on the novel by Simone de Beauvoir. Brian Moore was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 for The Great Victorian Collection and nominated for the Booker Prize three times. He has also been recognized in Canada with the Governor General's Literary Award twice. The literary technique of Moore, a master in the art of capturing the most recondite of the human soul, has been compared to that of writers like James Joyce or Graham Greene, who described him as "his favorite living writer." An author who, according to the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, "never ceases to surprise readers". He died in California in 1999.