John le Carré

John le Carré (real name is David John Moore Cournwell, born October 19, 1931, Poole, England) is an English writer, author of spy novels. Over the course of a half-century writing career, he has published 22 novels, which are translated into 36 languages. When John was five years old, his father went to jail for fraud, which, according to Le Carré, influenced his penchant for detectives. He studied at school, first in Berkshire, at the school of St. Andrew, then in Dorset. In 1948, Le Carré went to Switzerland, where he studied at the University of Bern, where he studied German literature for a year, then served in Austria as part of the British Intelligence Corps. After military service he studied at Oxford - since 1952, at his Lincoln College, which he graduated in 1956 with a first-class degree with honors in modern languages. There, he collaborated with MI-5 counterintelligence to monitor the left, infiltrating their community, for which John joined the Oxford University Communist Club and their other organizations. For two years (1956-8), Le Carré taught French and German at Eton College, and in 1958 began work as a full-time employee of MI-5. In 1959, he joined the MI-6 intelligence service, where he worked for the next five years under diplomatic cover in the Federal Republic of Germany. At first, he served as second secretary of the British Embassy in Bonn, then - consul in Hamburg. Le Carré published his first novel “Call the Dead” in 1961. At this time he worked in the public service, so he was forced to take a pseudonym. The third book, “The Spy Who Came From the Cold,” became the best seller, after which Le Carré quit the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and devoted himself to literary work. The novel “Little Drummer” (1983), which also became a bestseller, drew much attention from critics and the public. In 1954, he married Anna Veronica Sharp. A year after the divorce that followed in 1971, he married Valeria Jane Eustace. The writer has 4 sons (Simon, Stephen and Timothy from the first marriage and Nicholas from the second) and 12 grandchildren. After retiring, he lived on the Greek islands, then returned to his homeland. In 1987, Le Carré came to the USSR. While working on the book Single and Single, in 1998 he twice visited Georgia, in particular the western regions - Megrelia (Senaki, Nakalakevi, Betlemi, etc.). Joseph Brodsky was in the company of John le Carré at the time of the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature.