Pierre Loti died on 10 June 1923; it is more than fitting that the last of his great travelogues to be translated into English should be published in that language in 2023, the centenary of his death. Loti's Life A detailed account of Loti's life is to be found in the Introduction to our translation of his Vers Ispahan, The Way to Isfahan, Gerlach Press (Berlin 2021, pp. ix-xvi), and the following biography can be kept brief.

Loti was born Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud in Rochefort, in present-day Charente-Maritime, on 14 January 1850 into a middle-class Protestant family. His father was a functionary of the local mairie. Julien was much spoiled in his childhood by his mother, two grandmothers and an elderly aunt, all of whom doted on the child. After a lonely life at home, he was sent to the local college when he was twelve. In 1866, he left for Paris to attend the Lycée Napoléon and successfully sat the examinations for entry as an officer into the French Navy in 1867.

For the next forty years or so, more than twenty of them actually at sea, Julien (who became Pierre Loti in 1872 in Tahiti) travelled the world: the Americas, the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, the Far East and Indo- China and West Africa.

Loti wrote a series of novels, the first, Aziyade, was published in 1879; others followed as the years passed, perhaps the two most famous being Pecheur d’Islande, set among the Breton fishermen who sailed the northern waters, and Ramuntcho, a Basque love story. His novels gave way over the years to a whole series of travel writings, as he began to recount his journeys overseas, both official and private.

Loti was elected a member of the French Academy in 1891. He died in 1923 in Hendaye, on the Franco-Spanish border in Basque country. He was granted a state funeral, and, according to his wishes, was buried on the Île d’Oléron, off the west coast of France, near the mouth of the Charente and Rochefort, the town of his birth.