Joseph Conrad

Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on 3 December 1857, he grew up in a Poland carved among three empires. He went to sea with the French and British merchant navies, then pivoted to writing - in English, a language he didn't speak fluently until his twenties and never lost his accent in. Through the first two decades of the 20th century he produced novels and stories, many set on ships, that treated the world as indifferent and amoral and put human individuality under pressure. Lord Jim and others established a narrative style - impressionist or early modernist, depending on who's counting - that later writers kept reaching back to. He died 3 August 1924, but the work kept anticipating: critics note how his fiction seemed to see world events coming before they arrived.