UNLIKELY NOVELISTS

Raymond Chandler In 1932, aged 44, Chandler lost his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression and apparently said to himself: “Well, better become a detective fiction writer.” His first story was published a year later and his most famous novel, The Big

Sleep, in 1939.

Michael Punke

The former Deputy United States Trade Representative wrote his first book in the late Nineties, waking at 5am to write for three hours before doing his day job. It took almost four years to finish and he caught pneumonia four times. In 2002, The Revenant was published, in 2015 becoming an Oscarwinning film starring Leonardo Dicaprio.

James Joyce

Twenty years passed between Joyce’s 1922 book Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,

largely due to the fact Joyce was legally blind and suffered with eye pain his entire life. His final novel took 17 years to complete, and the Irishman often wrote while squinting, using crayons to make his words as bold as possible. Jean-dominique Bauby The former editor of French Elle suffered a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome. Yet with the use of technology, he managed to write a memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,

published in 1997, solely by blinking.