Patrick O'Brian was an English novelist, born Richard Patrick Russ in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, in 1914, whose Aubrey-Maturin sequence is widely held to be the finest historical naval fiction in the language.
A prodigy who published his first novel, Caesar, at fifteen, he spent decades as a distinguished translator from the French - bringing Henri Charrière's Papillon and Simone de Beauvoir into English - and as a biographer of Joseph Banks and Picasso, before the work that would define him. In 1945 he changed his name by deed poll from Russ to O'Brian and, with his wife Mary, settled for much of his life in Collioure on the French Mediterranean coast.
Master and Commander (1969) opened the twenty-novel Aubrey-Maturin series, set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and turning on the friendship between the bluff, brilliant sea captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin - ship's surgeon, naturalist and secret intelligence agent. Across the sequence, ending with Blue at the Mizzen, O'Brian married meticulous period detail and real seamanship to a comedy of manners and one of the great friendships in fiction; long a cult enthusiasm, the books broke through to enormous success in America in the 1990s.
He was the inaugural winner of the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in 1995 and was appointed CBE in 1997. Intensely private, he was distressed late in life when journalists revealed both his birth name and a first marriage and family he had long concealed. He died in Dublin in 2000; the series was filmed in 2003 as Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
