John le carré: the biography

This week the novelist received the Olof Palme prize for achievement in the spirit of the assassinated Swedish statesman.

John le carré son died

A range of emotions, not all of them beautiful, passed through my head at the moment when I was offered the Olof Palme prize. I am not a hero. I am a fraud. I am not a frontline advocate for truth or human rights. I have not suffered for my writing. I have been handsomely rewarded for it. And Carsten Jensen , writer on world conflict and sharer of its anguish.

It was only when I set out to explore the life and work of Olof Palme , and entered his spell, and discovered that same affinity with him that Ellsberg had so eloquently described, that it seemed just possible I might not be quite such a bad fit after all. Reading and thinking about Palme makes you wonder who you are. And where your moral courage went when it was needed.

You ask yourself what power drove him — golden boy, aristocratic family, brilliant scion of the best schools and the best cavalry regiment — to embrace from the outset of his career the cause of the exploited, the deprived, the undervalued and the unheard? Was there, somewhere in his early life, as there is in the lives of other men and women of his calibre, some defining moment of inner anger and silent purpose?

As a child he was sickly, and partly educated at home. He has the feel of a loner.