Michael de Larrabeiti

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Michael de Larrabeiti
Born(1934-08-18)18 August 1934
Trinity College, Dublin
Keble College, Oxford
GenreFantasy literature
Notable worksThe Borrible Trilogy

Michael de Larrabeiti (18 August 1934 – 18 April 2008) was an English

New Weird movement.[2]

Early life

One of five children, de Larrabeiti was born in

Basque from Bilbao
and was often absent.

In 1939 he was

11-plus, was educated at Clapham Central Secondary School. The teachers he had here, often men who had returned from fighting in the war determined to make a better world, were a great influence on de Larrabeiti, something he would later fictionalise in Journal of a Sad Hermaphrodite
.

Youth

After leaving school at sixteen, de Larrabeiti initially worked as a

cameraman in documentary films and as a travel guide in France and Morocco
.

In 1959 he fell in with a group of Provençal shepherds and went with them on the transhumance, herding three thousand sheep from their winter pasture to summer pasture in the French Alps. He then taught English in Casablanca, and in 1961 was the photographer on the University of Oxford's Marco Polo Expedition, travelling four months overland on a pair of BSA motorcycles and sidecar with Stanley Johnson and Tim Severin to Afghanistan and India. The adventure led to the publication of Severin's 1964 book Tracking Marco Polo with photographs by de Larrabeiti.

Between 1961 and 1965 he read French and English at

DPhil at Keble College, Oxford
which he later abandoned to take up full-time writing.

Writing career

De Larrabeiti continued to work as a guide and tour manager in the travel business for Clarksons and, later, as a freelance contributor to the

Sunday Times travel section, for which he wrote acclaimed travel essays. His books have also been critically well-received, with recent work being long-listed for the Booker Prize. 2006 saw the publication of his most recent novel, Princess Diana's Revenge; a collection of memoirs entitled Spots of Time was published in early 2007. His 1992 novel Journal of a Sad Hermaphrodite
is also set to be republished, after having been out of print for over ten years.

In his early years he espoused Marxism and remained a left-winger throughout his life. He lived in the Oxfordshire village of Great Milton with his wife Celia, and had three daughters. The last years of his life were blighted by cancer.

Bibliography

The Borrible Trilogy

Other works

References

  1. ^ Mangan, Lucy (16 May 2009). "Book Corner | A book lover's guide to building a brilliant children's library | No 30: The Borribles by Michael de Larrabeiti (1976)". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 22 February 2011.
  2. ^ "Obituary | Michael de Larrabeiti". The Daily Telegraph. 7 May 2008. Archived from the original on 29 April 2022. Retrieved 22 February 2011.

External links

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