Brian Moore ( ; 25 August 1921 – 11 January 1999), was a Northern Irish and Canadian writer. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland during and after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles, and has been described as "one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel".
He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times (in 1976, 1987 and 1990). Moore also wrote screenplays and several of his books were made into films. For the 1991 film adaptation of his historical novel Black Robe (1985) he won a Genie Award, a Canadian Screen Award for Best Screenplay.
Early life and education Moore was born and grew up in Belfast with eight siblings in a large Roman Catholic family. His grandfather, a severe, authoritarian solicitor, had been a Catholic convert. His father, James Bernard Moore, was a prominent surgeon and an observant Catholic and his mother, Eileen McFadden Moore, a farmer's daughter from County Donegal, was a nurse. His uncle was the prominent Irish nationalist Eoin MacNeill, founder of Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) and Professor of Irish at University College Dublin.
Moore was educated at Newington Elementary School and St Malachy's College, Belfast. He left the college in 1939, having failed his senior exams. The physical description of the school at the heart of The Feast of Lupercal matches closely that of Moore's alma mater and is widely held to be a lightly fictionalised setting of the college as he remembered its negative aspects.
Wartime service and move to North America Moore was a volunteer air raid warden during the Second World War and served during the Belfast Blitz in April and May 1941. He went on to serve as a civilian with the British Army in North Africa, Italy and France. After the war ended he worked in Eastern Europe for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
in 1948 he emigrated to Canada to work as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette, and became a Canadian citizen. Moore lived in Canada from 1948 to 1958. He moved to New York City in 1959 to take up a Guggenheim Fellowship and continued to live there until he and his first wife divorced in 1967.
Moore moved to the West Coast of the United States with his new wife Jean, settling in Malibu, California and teaching creative writing at UCLA. While eventually making his primary residence in California, Moore continued to live part of each year in Canada up to his death.
Novels and themes Moore wrote his first novels in Canada. His earliest books were thrillers, published under his own name or using the pseudonyms Bernard Mara or Michael Bryan. The first two of these pieces of pulp fiction, all of which he later disowned, were published in Canada by Harlequin – Wreath for a Redhead in March 1951 and The Executioners in July 1951.
Judith Hearne, which Moore regarded as his first novel and was the first he produced outside the thriller genre, remains among his most highly regarded. The book was rejected by ten American publishers before being accepted by a British publisher. It was adapted as a film, with British actress Maggie Smith playing the lonely spinster who is the book/film's title character.
Other novels by Moore were also adapted for the screen, including Intent to Kill, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Catholics, Black Robe, Cold Heaven, and The Statement. He co-wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, and wrote the screenplay for The Blood of Others. This was based on the novel Le Sang des autres by Simone de Beauvoir.
Moore criticised his Belfast Catholic schooling through his novels The Feast of Lupercal and The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Some of his novels feature staunchly anti-doctrinaire and anti-clerical themes. In particular, he spoke strongly about the effect of the Church on life in Ireland. A recurring theme in his novels is the concept of the Catholic priesthood. On several occasions, he explores the idea of a priest losing his faith. At the same time, several of his novels are deeply sympathetic and affirming portrayals of the struggles of faith and religious commitment, Black Robe most prominently.
Acclaim
Graham Greene said that Moore was his favourite living novelist, though Moore began to regard the label as "a bit of an albatross".
Personal life Moore was married twice. His first marriage, in 1952, was to Jacqueline ("Jackie") Sirois (née Scully), a French Canadian and fellow journalist with whom he had a son, Michael (who became a professional photographer), in 1953. They divorced in October 1967 and Jackie died in January 1976. Moore married his second wife, Jean Russell (née Denney), a former commentator on Canadian TV, in October 1967.
Moore's beachside house in Malibu, California was celebrated in Seamus Heaney's poem Remembering Malibu. Moore's widow, Jean, lived in the house until it was destroyed in 2018 in the Woolsey Fire.
Death Brian Moore died at his Malibu home on 11 January 1999, aged 77, from pulmonary fibrosis. He had been working on a novel about the 19th-century French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. His last published work, written just before his death, was an essay entitled "Going Home". It was a reflection inspired by a visit he made to the grave in Connemara of his family friend, the Irish republican Bulmer Hobson. The essay was commissioned by Granta and published in The New York Times on 7 February 1999. Despite Moore's often conflicted attitude to Ireland and his Irishness, his concluding reflection in the piece was "The past is buried until, in Connemara, the sight of Bulmer Hobson's grave brings back those faces, those scenes, those sounds and smells which now live only in my memory. And in that moment I know that when I die I would like to come home at last to be buried here in this quiet place among the grazing cows."
Legacy
In 1996, the Creative Writers Network in Northern Ireland launched the Brian Moore Short Story Awards. The awards scheme continued until 2008 and is now defunct.
Moore has been the subject of two biographies: Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist (1998) by Denis Sampson and Brian Moore: A Biography (2002) by Patricia Craig. Brian Moore and the Meaning of the Past (2007) by Patrick Hicks provides a critical retrospective of Moore's works. Information about the publishing of Moore's novel Judith Hearne, and the break-up of his marriage can be found in Diana Athill's memoir Stet (2000).Athill, Diana (2000) Stet: a memoir, London: Granta
In 1975, Moore arranged for his literary materials, letters and documents to be deposited in the Special Collections Division of the University of Calgary Library, an inventory of which was published by the University of Calgary Press in 1987. Moore's archives, which include unfilmed screenplays, drafts of various novels, working notes, a 42-volume journal (1957–1998), and his correspondence, are now at The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin.
To mark the centenary in 2021 of Moore's birth, a project − Brian Moore at 100 − funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant, sought to re-appraise his work, and revive scholarly and public interest in it. The project included a programme of research, public-facing events and an international academic conference.
In 2023 an Ulster History Circle blue plaque was unveiled by the Lord Mayor of Belfast, close to where Moore was born.
Prizes and honours 1955 Beta Sigma Phi award (best first novel by a Canadian author for Judith Hearne) 1955 Authors' Club First Novel Award (for Judith Hearne, chosen by C.S. Forester) 1959 Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction 1960 Governor General's Award for Fiction (for The Luck of Ginger Coffey) 1975 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction (for The Great Victorian Collection) 1975 Governor General's Award for Fiction (for The Great Victorian Collection) 1976 Nominee, Booker Prize (for The Doctor's Wife) 1987 Nominee, Booker Prize (for The Colour of Blood) 1987 The Sunday Express Book of the Year (for The Colour of Blood) 1987 Honorary doctorate from Queen's University Belfast 1990 Nominee, Booker Prize (for Lies of Silence) 1991 Genie Award, a Canadian Screen Award for Best Screenplay (for the film adaptation of Black Robe} 1994 Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Los Angeles Times for his novels
Bibliography
Non-fiction and essays (with the editors of Life) Canada (1963) "Now and Then", in Threshold 23: The Northern Crisis, edited by John Montague. Belfast: Lyric Players Theatre (1970). Republished as "Bloody Ulster: An Irishman's Lament" in The Atlantic, September 1970 "The essential sameness of the Belfast of the post-1970 Troubles and the city he lived in from his birth in 1921 until his early twenties is the subject of Moore's finest piece of non-fictional prose." "Old Father, Old Artificer", in Irish University Review 12 (Spring 1982), chapter 12 (on James Joyce) "Going Home" in The New York Times, 7 February 1999
Novels Wreath for a Redhead (1951) (U.S. title: Sailor's Leave, published 1953) The Executioners (1951) French for Murder (1954) (as Bernard Mara) A Bullet for My Lady (1955) (as Bernard Mara) Judith Hearne (1955) (reprinted as The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne in 1956) This Gun for Gloria (1956) (as Bernard Mara) Intent to Kill (1956) (as Michael Bryan) The Feast of Lupercal (1957) (reprinted as A Moment of Love in 1969) Murder in Majorca (1957) (as Michael Bryan) The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960) An Answer from Limbo (1962) The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965) I Am Mary Dunne (1968) Fergus (1970) The Revolution Script (1971) Catholics (1972, first printed in New American Review 15 (New York: Simon & Schuster 1972) pp. 11–72 The Great Victorian Collection (1975) The Doctor's Wife (1976) The Mangan Inheritance (1979) (originally published as The Family Album) The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981) Cold Heaven (1983) Black Robe (1985) The Colour of Blood (1987) Lies of Silence (1990) No Other Life (1993) The Statement (1995) The Magician's Wife (1997)
Short story collections Two Stories (1978), Northridge, California: Santa Susana Press. Contains "Uncle T" and "Preliminary Pages for a Work of Revenge" The Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories (2020), London: Turnpike Books
Short stories "Sassenach", Northern Review 5 (October–November 1951) "Fly Away Finger, Fly Away Thumb", London Mystery Magazine, 17, September 1953 : reprinted in Haining, Peter (ed.) Great Irish Tales of Horror, Souvenir Press 1995; and reprinted in Moore, Brian. The Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories (2020). London: Turnpike Books. "The Specialist", Bluebook, March 1953 "Enemies of the People", Bluebook, May 1953 "The Ridiculous Proposal", Bluebook, January 1954 "A Vocation", Tamarack Review 1 (Autumn 1956): 18–22; reprinted in Threshold 2 (Summer 1958): 21–25; reprinted in Garrity, Devin A (ed.) The Irish Genius, (1960). New York: New American Library, pp. 125–128; reprinted for the Verbal Arts Centre project, 1998; and reprinted in Moore, Brian. The Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories (2020). London: Turnpike Books. "Lion of the Afternoon", The Atlantic, November 1957; reprinted in Pacey, Desmond (ed.) A Book of Canadian Stories (1962). Toronto: Ryerson Press, pp. 283–293 and reprinted in Moore, Brian. The Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories (2020). London: Turnpike Books "Next Thing was Kansas City", The Atlantic, February 1959 "Grieve for the Dear Departed", The Atlantic, August 1959; reprinted in Pudney, John (ed.) Pick of Today's Short Stories, no. 12 (1960). London: Putnam, pp. 179–188 and reprinted in Moore, Brian. The Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories (2020). London: Turnpike Books