Ian S. MacNiven

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Ian S. MacNiven’s authorized biography of Lawrence Durrell was listed by the New York Times as a Notable Book in 1998, and it was awarded a prize by the city of Antibes in France for the best study on Durrell in the same year, cited as “l’étude le plus complète et la plus pénétrante sur cet auteur méditerranéen.” In the course of researching his biography of Durrell, MacNiven traveled over a period of twenty years from India to California, interviewing hundreds of individuals and visiting all but one of the many places his subject had lived.MacNiven’s authorized biography of the poet and publisher James Laughlin, “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Biography of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014. Earlier, he edited two collections of Durrell’s correspondence with Richard Aldington and Henry Miller. MacNiven is also the author of numerous articles on various figures of literary modernism, and over the years has directed and spoken at conferences on three continents. He is an emeritus professor of literature at SUNY Maritime College, and he currently resides on the west bank of the Hudson, outside Athens, New York.