About James

James Clavell was born in Australia, when his Royal Navy father was on an admiralty assignment, and grew up in England. His father, a Royal Navy Commander, often told stories of his days sailing down the Yangtze River and serving in the British China Station before World War I. It was then that Clavell's fascination with Asia began. His English public school education was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. He joined the army and served as a captain in the Royal Artillery in the Far East and was captured by the Japanese in Java in 1941. Clavell spent three years as a POW at the infamous Changi jail in Singapore, where only one of every fifteen men survived malnutrition, disease, and inhumane conditions.

After the war, Clavell worked in the English film industry as a distributor, but he ultimately immigrated to the United States to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. However, before finding success in Hollywood, Clavell first landed in New York where he and his wife April, bred and sold standard Poodles (which were rumored to be direct descendants of Winston Churchill’s Poodle) to make ends meet. Shortly after they made it to Los Angeles he wrote his first successful script, The Fly, which is still considered a science fiction-horror classic. Others followed, including Watusi, The Great Escape, 633 Squadron, and The Satan Bug. He became a writer-producer-director with The Sweet and the Bitter, Five Gates to Hell, Walk Like a Dragon, To Sir With Love, Where’s Jack?, and The Last Valley.

With time on his hands during the Hollywood screenwriter's strike of 1960, April asked him, “what the hell are you doing around the house?” to which he said, “I'm going to sit in the sun.” She then famously replied, “No way. Go into the room and write the book, and don't come out until you've done five pages." So he did, and in a cathartic 12-week sprint, Clavell wrote the first draft of King Rat, which was published in 1962. Eight hundred pages long and an immediate best-seller, King Rat is a semi-autobiographical story that drew directly from his experiences as a prisoner of war.

King Rat became the first story in his "Asian Saga", a chronicle of the history of Anglo-Saxons in Asia. The subsequent novels in the saga are Tai-Pan (1966), Shōgun (1975), Noble House (1981), Whirlwind (1986) and Gai-Jin (1993). Each book has become a monumental best-seller, standing alone as an individual story, but also intertwined with that which came before. Other works outside the saga include The Children’s Story (1981), The Art of War (with Foreword and Notes by James Clavell, 1983), Escape: The Love Story from Whirlwind (1994), and Thrump-O-Moto (1985). Due to his achievements in the literary world, Clavell received honorary doctorates in literature from the University of Bradford in Great Britain and Maryland University.

One of the reoccurring questions throughout Clavell’s career has been how a former Changi prisoner of war could shift perspective so completely. He once tried to articulate his perspective on the matter by stating, "The answer is I don't know. Obviously [King Rat] was a catharsis, because obviously after that I could write a passionately pro-Japanese thing and understand and be gentle with a great deal of understanding about the Japanese. I can't explain it myself either. I usually say, 'Well, I was Japanese in a previous life. Or Chinese in a previous life.'"

Clavell passed away in 1994 after a courageous battle with cancer, but his legacy lives on through his novels, which continue to captivate and inspire people to this day.