Page "Patrick O'Brian" Paragraph 2

Between 1946 and 1949 the O ' Brians lived in Cwm Croesor, a remote valley in north Wales, where they initially rented a cottage from Clough Williams-Ellis.

The area enabled O ' Brian to pursue his interest in natural history ; he fished, went birdwatching, and followed the local hunt.

During this time they lived on Mary O ' Brian's small income and the limited earnings from O ' Brian's writings.

The countryside and people provided inspiration for many of his short stories of the period, and also his novel Testimonies ( 1952 ), which is set in a thinly disguised Cwm Croesor, and which was well received by critics.

In 1949 O ' Brian and Mary moved to Collioure, a Catalan town in southern France.

Over the ensuing four decades he worked on his own writings, his British literary reputation growing slowly, and also became an established translator of French works into English.

In the early 1990s the Aubrey-Maturin series was successfully relaunched into the American market, attracting critical acclaim and dramatically increasing O ' Brian's sales and public profile in the UK and America.

In 1995 he was awarded the inaugural Heywood Hill Literary Prize for his lifetime's writings, and he received a CBE in 1997.

He and Mary remained together in Collioure until her death in 1998, but he continued to work on his naval novels, spending the winter of 1998 – 1999 at Trinity College, Dublin, which had awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1997.