Dubai: It is a little hard to visualise, but Louis de Bernieres, British author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin and more recently A Partisan's Daughter, dreamt of becoming a punk rocker in his twenties.
His band, 'Irreparable Brain Damage' later dispersed, and to the joy of millions of readers he penned his first book.
Speaking to a large audience at the Emirates Airlines International Festival of Literature (EAIFL) on Saturday, de Bernieres said it was in his thirties that he found himself trapped in his lodgings - due to a "mad landlady", and sedentary with a broken leg due to a motorcycle accident - that he wrote his first book The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts.
"I always knew I would be a writer, since the age of 12 I wrote poetry. It is my first love but at the age of 35 I had a motorcycle accident, my Irish girlfriend went back to Ireland so in conditions of a mad landlady and an absent girlfriend I wrote it for my own entertainment," he said.
This is his first time in the Middle East and while for his next novel de Bernieres is looking to Greece again as a potential setting, "with more research an Arab country could feature one day," he said.
At school, de Bernieres grew up writing stories every week thanks to an enthusiastic English teacher who also made his pupils memorise poetry, and at home his parents retold accounts from the Second World War while his grandparents remembered the First. "Even if I write a terrible poem I keep it because there might be a line in there I can use later - nothing ever goes to waste. I just have to remember to burn it all before I die," he joked with the audience.
